The Brief

Elizabeth Hill saw going to college as her way out of poverty. But 26 years later, she is still paying back student loans, with around $145,000 still left to go.

“I've been able to stay afloat, but I do not have $145,000 to give them,” Hill said. “My debt-to-income ratio has impacted my ability to do things because I've got this six-figure loan just sitting there on my credit report.”

Hill is a therapist who specializes in care for Black, brown, indigenous, queer and trans people. And as an autism assessor, she was relying on an Obama-era plan to have her loan forgiven. She said she signed up for a consolidation plan, and if her loan was in good standing for 20 years, her loan would be forgiven.

That option has ended, though, which means she is looking at a lifetime of repaying her debt.

July 1 brings a plethora of changes to student loans as the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act goes into effect. It ends the Biden-era SAVE plan, where monthly payments were calculated on income and family size, so now borrowers have to look into new repayment plans. And if you do not transition to a new plan, you will be automatically transferred to a plan. Some of the plans on offer could increase monthly payments by a couple of hundred dollars. And the new changes also set limits for how much prospective students can borrow — and could force them to seek out costly private loans.

California could feel those effects deeply. An analysis by the California Policy Lab found that around 11% of borrowers in the state were 30-plus days late on their monthly payments last September. That number was around 3.7% when the pandemic began. Around 10% of Angelenos were delinquent on their loans. Per an analysis from Protect Borrowers using federal data, the total student debt in the SoCal region was $70.7 billion, with over half of that number owned by women.

Trying to do good, at personal cost

Hill had a Pell Grant — financial aid from the federal government that does not need to be paid back — and work study to complete community college in Oregon. Then, at the age of 18, she took out loans in her name, as well as under her mother’s name, to attend San Diego State University for undergrad.

After she graduated, she tried to stay afloat and keep her loans in good standing. But to become a therapist, like she wanted to, she said she needed a graduate degree to increase her earning potential.

“I come from a family that didn't have any money, and the only way to go to school was to take out these loans,” she said. “There was no advisement — this is what the interest is going to be; this is how much you're going to pay back. I'm 18 years old, just signing stuff so I can get into school.”

As a therapist, Hill said, she works with “the most marginalized populations because that's where my heart is, that's where I feel the most comfortable, and I'm a member of those populations as well.”

But that means she has to also work on a sliding scale.

“So the folk who can afford to pay the fee are almost essentially sponsoring the other ones who can't, if that makes sense. It's almost like a system of mutual aid,” Hill said.

Despite doing this work helping uplift marginalized communities for around 25 years, Hill said, there is no reward for it.

“I'm still expected to come up with over six figures to pay back the government,” she said.

No job plan, just a repayment plan

Sara Alsheikh took out student loans to attend the University of California, Riverside.

College, she said, was a confusing time. She thought she wanted to pursue a career in psychiatry but then pivoted to linguistics.

“ It focused on language, etymologically, and then also, I love anthropology, I love culture, I love people, I love to travel, so linguistics seemed like the perfect match for me,” Alsheikh said.

When she graduated, she didn’t have a plan. But that did not stop the loan repayment.

“ I'm not really seeing the fruits of my labor, and immediately, I got to start paying my loans. So, it kind of felt like, did I make the right decision?” she said. “I think I'm still kind of in that limbo, where like, OK, I went to school, I was proud, and I was happy that I did this, but I don't know.”

She’s still uncertain whether she made the right decision to go to college, she said.

Alsheikh graduated in 2023 and the total loan amount then was around $25,000. Three years later, that number is still the same. She made some payments but had to take a break when she lost her job.

Alsheikh said she only had a “vague understanding” of what she was signing up for.

“ It was just packaged up nice, like, take loans because you need to go to school, and then you can get around it. There will be options for you,” she said.

Those options haven’t materialized. Instead, Alsheikh said, she and others have been “left to the wolves” to figure out a “suffocating and quite complicated” process.

And the upcoming changes mean her monthly repayment amount is set to jump from $50 to around $150 — and this is after she called up her loan servicing provider to figure out her options.

College, Alsheikh said, is encouraged and portrayed as a way to improve your financial standing. But now, she said, she feels like “money is at the center of education.”

Helping new students learn from her experience

Shirley Portal, a nurse turned financial professional living in Los Angeles, gets triggered every time she hears the term student loans.

“Everybody in my position that went to school had to deal with it, whether it's federal or private loans. I feel like there's a lot of miseducation, or actually no education at all on the subject,” she said. “When I went to school, I went to the office. I wanted to ask how to start, how to pay. The first thing they did is literally shove the name of the company they work with, the loaner, and they just recommended it, and that's it.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ends the Biden-era SAVE plan, where monthly payments were calculated on income and family size, so now borrowers have to look into new repayment plans.

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Maria Grejc for NPR

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Portal took out a student loan with an 11% interest rate to pay for nursing school, a rate she said was “inhuman.”

And after graduating, despite a padded resume with volunteer work and high test scores, she still couldn’t get a job.

“I had to go back to work an office job just to pay those loans,” Portal said. And even then, she considered living out of her car to pay off the loans just because of how high her payment was.

And then came COVID-19, “a slap in the face,” she said.

“They begged us to work, which means I worked 20 days in a row. There was no equipment. I have pictures of me wearing trash bags as gowns that we cut, and there were no masks, so I worked the same mask for 14 days,” Portal said.

The overtime had a silver lining, though: It meant she could finally pay off her nursing school loans, which amounted to over $50,000 plus interest.

But all that overtime also meant she had to pay more taxes.

“ I realized that I'm paying a lot more taxes than I should because I simply worked overtime. I worked holidays while everybody else sat at home and got paychecks,” Portal said.

It was at that moment that she decided to switch careers.

“I'm done being used and abused. This job is already hard mentally, physically, and then after COVID, there was zero appreciation,” she said.

Now, Portal works as a finance professional helping borrowers navigate student debt and taking hold of their finances.

And as borrowers reckon with the changes to their monthly payments because of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, she’s on hand to help.

How should students navigate the new loan changes?

Celina Damian is California’s student loan ombudsperson, appointed by the state to investigate complaints into loan service providers.

With the incoming changes to federal student loans, she said, it might lead to prospective students and families turning to riskier types of financing: private loans.

These have “higher interest rates, they don't have the forgiveness, discharge programs, the repayment forbearance options that federal loans do.”

Damian added that private loans would also require established credit worthiness, which might force students to look for co-signers. She hopes prospective students understand the implications of taking these loans and how it could impact their financial standing in the future.

“You really have to be making good decisions on the front end because then we're seeing this at the back end where I am, right, and I hear many borrowers that have regrets,” Damian said.

Damian advised prospective students and their families to understand their debt they could potentially be taking on. They can start by going to the California Student Aid Commission. Damian said they will help students fill out their FAFSA and help them determine the real cost of attending a school.

And if they are in school and run out of money, Damian asked students to really shop around and understand their options and understand things like fixed-interest rates vs. variable interest rates.

 ”There's scholarships everywhere, through your parents' employment, through the banks, through McDonald's,” Damian said. “But it does require work. It does require someone to start in the 10th grade sometimes, trying to get those scholarships.”

Recent court filings paint two contradictory pictures about what is happening behind closed doors at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, the privately run immigration detention center 90 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

On the one hand, federal officials argue conditions at Adelanto already meet the standards set by U.S. District Court Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes. Sykes ordered the government to make immediate improvements at the detention facility on July 16.

And, in any case, they’ve asked the judge to hold off on enforcing her order while they appeal.

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs — people detained at the facility — instead describe routine violations of the court order still taking place today. They argue delaying enforcement will prolong violations of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process and fair treatment before the law.

How we got here

The case was filed in January by lawyers representing people detained at Adelanto after two people died at the facility — two more people have died since then.

Here are some key allegations in the lawsuit:

• Problems with access to medical care and disability accommodations
• Contaminated water
• Water unavailable 24/7
• Food that doesn't meet dietary requirements

Sykes found enough evidence to support these claims to require immediate action. That’s where the preliminary injunction comes in.

And that did two things: It ordered some changes to be made right away, like 24-hour access to clean water and healthy food. Then it asked the government to prepare a plan for long term improvements. That’s the plan filed by federal officials late Thursday, July 30, which was short on details and also claimed many of the alleged complaints were invalid.

A July 31 filing by plaintiffs’ attorneys fundamentally disagreed, saying “conditions at Adelanto are not a matter of dispute; they are documented by extensive expert testimony, declarations from detained individuals, and the Government’s own admissions.”

The filing calls the government’s request for a stay a delaying tactic, one that would keep in place “conditions this Court found likely unconstitutional, and in which four people have died.”

Sophia Wrench, an attorney for the plaintiffs with Public Counsel, said the government’s request is full of contradictions.

“This request to hold off on enforcing this injunction represents a pattern of behavior on the part of the government to continually delay implementing court orders,” Wrench said. “They are simultaneously arguing that they’re already doing everything that the court order is asking them to do, but also saying that it would irreparably injure them to continue to implement the order. So meanwhile, the 1,800 plus people at Adelanto still don’t have clean water consistently, still don’t have clean facilities, and still experience mold that has not been remediated.”

Asked for comment about the plaintiff’s most recent filing, The GEO Group Inc., the private company contracted to run Adelanto under a $400 million annual contract through 2029, referred LAist to ICE.

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded to a request to comment for this story, but in a previous, unsigned statement, the agency said reports of substandard conditions at Adelanto are false.

Alleged worms in the water

One central area of dispute is over water, both access and quality.

Federal officials say both are adequate. In a declaration filed to the court on July 30, Ryan Smith, an ICE assistant field office director, said conditions outlined in the July 16 court injunction are being met.

Smith’s declaration said the facility already provides clean drinking water 24 hours a day, with access to drinking fountains supplied by the same municipal water company that supplies the town of Adelanto.

Shortly after Smith’s declaration was filed, L.A. Taco reported a man held at Adelanto, Carlitos Ricardo Parias, said he discovered black worms in the drinking water there. An attorney representing Parias said Parias got the water from coolers provided by the facility, and shared the video showing the worms with LAist.

Other people detained at Adelanto complained about the water in new court filings. A declaration filed by Wrench, of Public Counsel, includes reports from four men held inside the facility who all report “significant delays” accessing clean drinking water since the court order.

Water is available from a sink inside the cells and in Igloo jugs, according to the declaration, which also notes those detained said it’s only been since the lawsuit was filed in January that GEO guards instructed them to drink from the sink.

The declaration says that even the water in the jugs “appears to be stale and dirty, with visible black sediment in the water.”

Guards occasionally take the water dispensers away, one plaintiff reported, leading the men in his unit to chant “Agua! Agua! Agua!”

One plaintiff said the men in his unit do not have clean drinking water for four hours at a time nearly every day. He said on July 22, nearly a week after the order, around 25 people in the unit filed a collective grievance and were told by a guard that they could drink water from the sink instead.

While it’s true that the Adelanto Water Department provides water to the facility, Wrench said that doesn’t explain away issues with water cleanliness.

“The city of Adelanto serves water to the entire city of Adelanto. So they are responsible to that point, but once the water is in the detention center, Adelanto is responsible for the storage of the water, the quality of the pipes, the overlay with the sewer system,” Wrench said. “We’re getting things like people saying the water smells, alternatively, like bleach or smells like water, we’re seeing that the water is dark colored. That’s what we’re hearing from folks inside. That doesn’t align with what GEO Group and ICE are telling us.”

Alleged defiance of the order and ongoing staffing issues

The plaintiffs also report in the court declarations that ICE has failed to improve access to healthy food, medical care or exercise in the yard.

According to the declaration, people detained at Adelanto report The GEO Group employees telling them they either have not heard of the order, or that ICE has told them not to make any changes until the appeal is finalized.

One example in the declaration: A detained man who raised the court order with a GEO officer, a captain, reported she told him that she had not seen the order and said that the facility was short-staffed. The next day, the man said that the captain called him into her office to explain that, since the order was being appealed, it would not be enforced.

“She explained that once ICE told them to enforce the [preliminary injunction], they would do so immediately, but that ICE had not told them to enforce it,” according to the declaration.

In their application to delay implementing the July 16 order, lawyers for the federal government explain that there are approximately 52 ICE employees on-site, along with 350 security and operations staff and 100 medical staff employed by GEO Group. There are currently about 1,800 people being held at Adelanto.

Wrench told LAist that staffing appears to be a major issue at Adelanto.

“We are hearing that guards have to work 16, 18 hour shifts, and so they’re burning out quickly, either getting fired or leaving, quitting their jobs,” Wrench said. “Almost every time I go to Adelanto, I’m hearing new people being trained on the job when I’m speaking to different staff. That means they don’t have enough guards to clean, they don’t have enough guards to supervise people in their outdoor time, and so that means they have to cut corners.”

Who is responsible for Adelanto?

In court filings, the federal government has argued that the government cannot address the issues in the court order, because the Adelanto facility is run by GEO, its contractor.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs dispute this reasoning, what the recent court filings call the “defendant’s central gambit.” They claim Sykes was briefed on this argument and rejected it in issuing the order for relief. According to plaintiffs’ filings, ICE has the contractual authority to require GEO’s compliance with any conditions the court orders. “ICE need not physically operate the mop to ensure the floors are clean, it need only exercise the contract provisions that already require GEO to do so,” a filing from July 31 states.

“It’s quite frankly ridiculous that they continue to argue that because GEO is not a direct party to the case, that they don’t have levers of control over GEO to be implementing this order,” Wrench told LAist. “They have a contract with GEO Group to be doing the day-to-day operations for this facility. There is a constitutional duty that the government has whenever they are detaining someone.”

In the latest earnings call, GEO’s CEO and founder George Zoley, who immigrated to the U.S. from Greece in 1953, said the federal government was looking to take direct ownership of immigration detention centers.

“As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities,” Zoley said. “They are federal facilities to begin with, in my opinion.”

Ice-Age discoveries are still happening at the La Brea Tar Pits while the museum is closed for renovations.

And for the first time in Los Angeles, researchers have found a new species of extinct amphibian, according to a study released Wednesday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The little amphibian is a type of spadefoot toad — which technically aren’t toads but have the word in the common name. The researchers have affectionately named it Spea labreae (spay-ah lah-bray-eye) — a nod to the location where it was discovered.

How they found the amphibian

Spea labreae is now one of only two amphibians found from this era in North America. The other is a tree frog in Florida.

The study’s lead author, José Alberto Cruz, discovered the spadefoot while reviewing a collection of bones that had been barely touched since they were excavated from Rancho La Brea in 1929.

This incomplete sacro-urostyle bone (base of the spine that connects to the hips) is the holotype specimen used to describe the new species, Spea labreae.

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Courtesy La Brea Tar Pits

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At first, he said, he thought the sample came from a sick or injured amphibian in the already known spadefoot family. But as he compared the bones, he realized that couldn’t explain the differences in what he saw.

“[I thought,] 'Oh my god, this is a new species that is [being kept] in a drawer,'” he said. “And now it’s in the light to the world.”

This was Cruz's first discovery of an extinct species. He said he measured the bones to determine the size. According to his research, it was a bit larger than today's spadefoots. (Reporter’s note: Sorry to anyone who was hoping for it to be huge, like I was.)

As for the name, Spea labreae may seem self-explanatory, but there’s another reason.

“ The team [is] amazing,” he said. “All the people inside, the curators, the collection managers, the excavation lab — all the people are great.”

Why the discovery matters for climate change

Amphibians are incredibly sensitive to climate changes and need water. Because of that, researchers can learn more about what conditions were like during the Ice Age, such as precipitation and temperature, just from a frog's presence.

“ The birds, they can fly. If the conditions are very bad, they move,” he said. “But in the case of toads, frogs … they can’t move a lot.”

Co-author Emily Lindsey, a  vertebrate paleontologist at the La Brea Tar Pits, said the new discovery could offer insights about a much colder, wetter L.A. region.

Reconstructions of the dark Spea labreae at the center and right in the La Brea Tar Pits, compared with Spea hammondii (light spadefoot, left), which is the species in L.A. today. The Mexican burrowing toad is at the bottom.

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Artwork by Arturo Dávalos

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Courtesy La Brea Tar Pits

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“ If we’re trying to understand what Los Angeles looked like during the Ice Age, these are some of our best clues that can give us information about that,” she said.

For Spea labreae, L.A. is its only known home so far. But researchers also found the first record of the Mexican burrowing toad here, which today is only found in southern Mexico.

Lindsey said something big may have happened that made the toad move, such as climate changes during the late Ice Age or the arrival of humans.

Although the new discoveries won’t be in a dedicated exhibit when the museum reopens, they will be incorporated into the format.

“ Toads are definitely going to be represented in the new museum,” Lindsey said, “along with insects, songbirds, pack rats and all of the other plants and animals that make up an ecosystem.”

The second ticket drop for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles launches Monday, and fans will learn this week if they have a slot.

Just like last time, anyone who wants to buy tickets to the Games had to pre-register. That automatically entered them into a lottery for a window to buy tickets.

Those who won a spot will receive an email Thursday or Friday.

Ticket sales for Drop 2 will launch Aug. 10 and run through Aug. 20. Fans are limited to 12 tickets each, with an additional 12 allowed for the Olympic soccer tournament.

Purchases are limited to four tickets maximum for both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Those who purchased fewer than that in the first round of ticket sales — or didn't get a spot — will be automatically re-entered into Drop 2.

Tickets start at $28 a piece, and some will be available at that price in this next round of sales.

In the first drop, cheap tickets went fast, and many were left only with options in the hundreds and thousands of dollars. Ticket prices include a 24% service fee, which raised eyebrows for some people when they reached check-out.

LA28 is counting on ticket and hospitality sales to bring in $2.5 billion to cover the costs of putting on the Games. If they don't hit that mark, public funds could be on the line.

Organizers will launch an official ticket re-sale market next year. Tickets to the Paralympic Games will also go on sale in 2027.

A federal judge on Tuesday held the Department of Homeland Security in contempt for allegedly slow-rolling an order to create digital copies of communications from personal and government cell phones used by immigration agents during operations in the Los Angeles area last year.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in the Central District of California previously ordered the federal government in January to expedite imaging the personal cell phones of more than 800 agents involved in controversial immigration raids in Los Angeles in 2025.

Judge Frimpong imposed a fine of $500 per day on the federal government until it complies with the order to turn over phones as part of discovery and reimburse plaintiffs’ attorneys for the legal costs of getting the records.

Attorneys for DHS admitted in court in June that the agency had not provided the records. They told the judge they were processing the government devices at a rate of three phones every two weeks, which plaintiffs noted would take nearly four years to complete.

Attorneys representing immigrants caught up in Operation At Large — the name given to the Trump administration’s Los Angeles immigration crackdown last year — argue the phones may contain evidence of a pattern of racial profiling by federal agents.

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in May that the Department of Homeland Security “simply proceeded to thwart” Frompong’s order “by dragging their feet on imaging government-issued cell phones and by openly defying the order as to personal phones.”

Last month, ACLU attorneys asked Frimpong to issue another order that would prohibit agents from detaining people based on their race. They cited text messages and body camera footage in which agents used racial slurs, including “wet and “tonks,” to identify working-class Latinos to stop, according to court records.

“Not only are federal agents violating the Constitution on the streets, the government is violating court orders by intentionally withholding critical evidence about its immigration enforcement operations.” said Mayra Joachin with the ACLU of Southern California.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.