The Brief

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

When Serajul Islam took his first bite of the traditional Bengali dessert, roshogolla, after moving to Los Angeles, he found the dough was quite hard.

It was the 1990s, shortly after he immigrated from Jashore, Bangladesh with his wife, Farida.

He was brainstorming about what type of business they could open in L.A. and it was this syrup-filled ball of dough that made him realize how much he missed the dessert from home. 

“When I ate that roshogolla, it felt like if someone would hit my head with that, my head would break open,” he said. “That was when it struck my mind to open a sweet shop.” 

This is the origin story of Aladin Sweets and Market at 139 S. Vermont Avenue, one of the oldest Bengali restaurants and shops in the neighborhood. 

To this day, the family business has their regular customers who value the market’s traditional dessert recipes, including the roshogollas or laddoo, chickpea flour fried in oil.

Sadman Farooqui, a regular customer said on a recent visit, “The laddoo here is number one. Laddoo like Bangladesh is found only here in Los Angeles.”

The variety of Bengali sweets available at Aladin Sweets & Market.

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Avidha Raha

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The LA Local

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A few gallons of milk

Serajul and Farida moved to Los Angeles with their three kids in 1990. Serajul always wanted to own a business and initially rented a frozen dessert shop to check if it would be a good fit. He only lasted a month. 

After eating the hard roshogolla he came back home and spoke about it to his wife, about his grand ambition to sell desserts. The couple purchased a few gallons of milk from a Vons market and tried making sweets at home. The first few attempts were not successful.

Fresh, homemade sweets made regularly with chhana marks the authenticity of Bengali sweets.

Chhana is a fresh, unripened acid-set cottage cheese made by curdling milk with an acidic agent like lemon juice or whey, then straining out the liquid whey. It is the absolute foundational building block of traditional Bengali confections, serving as the raw dough-like base needed for preparation of the sweets. 

Serajul called a friend in Bangladesh, who owned the Madhu Sweet Shop in Jashore. Over the phone, their friend guided them through the nuances of making chhana (cheese curds) which is turned into a smooth dough. After repeated attempts, the chhana texture finally came out perfect.

Cooked Bangladeshi food and signature items like Pran chips and Gobindovog rice.

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Avidha Raha

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The LA Local

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From a humble catering service operated out of their home, Farida and Serajul expanded the business into a full-blown shop. Now, Aladin has become an institution in the Little Bangladesh area, where everyone can go and feel a little sense of nostalgia. 

Caught in between other small shops and grocery stores in the densely packed streets. Aladin Sweets sits near Koreatown’s sushi and Korean barbecue bars, modestly consistent with its homemade desserts that bring in their loyal customer base from all over L.A. County.

Parvin Akhtar, a customer from outside the neighborhood, has kept coming back to Aladin for more than eight years.

“Even though the price is a little expensive, I keep coming back from far away in Torrance, because I like the sweets here,” Akhtar said.

Winning over the toughest critics

Serajul takes pride in serving not only the community here, but also legendary artists who visited L.A. at some point; like Manna Dey, Bhupen Hazarika, and even A.R. Rahman in the more recent times. He hopes that people think of Aladin as that spot which feels like home away from home. 

Through the glass doors of Aladin, the first thing that can be seen are very easily identifiable Bengali sweets. Roshogollas, sandesh, kalo jaam, laddoo, mishti doi and chhana jalebis are some of the most popular items. 

Aladin also serves savory and sumptuous Bengali meals like fish curry, biriyani, mutton, tehari, pulao, luchi, and so on.  The moment upon entering, people can smell the aroma of specific Bengali spices such as black nigella seeds, fenugreek, mustard, cumin and fennel seeds. 

While the savory menu is impeccable, it is the sweets that paved the way towards the foundation of this restaurant. 

Soon the word spread and it reached the ears of an organizer from Dakshini Bengali Association of California, who gave Serajul and Farida their first stall in their upcoming event. 

“It was a three-hour long event, but all our food was sold out in the very first hour. That event became a huge advertisement for us,” Serajul said. 

Their stall with homemade Bengali sweets and snacks like patties and fritters, which people were seeing after a long time, lured everyone in.

Legendary singer Manna Dey, left, visits Aladin Sweets and Market in the 1990s.

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Courtesy Aladin Sweets and Market

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After winning the approval of the toughest critics in Southern California, every Bengali event – be it Bangladeshi or Indian – invited them to sell their food. They started catering from home in full swing: to larger events, concerts and even weddings. Soon after, the store Aladin Sweets and Market came into existence in 1993, and there has been no looking back ever since. 

It all started with the motivation to produce chhana at home like every other Bengali household, and make sweets for the diaspora in Los Angeles hungry for a taste of home. 

Serajul and Farida’s son, Mokibul,  also runs the business and recalled from his childhood how his mother would keep the sweet-gifting tradition amongst Bengali households alive.

“My mother would make homely sweets which were popular in Bangladesh, as gifts to share with people here,” Mokibul said. 

Farida explained the sweet-making process that she has been following all these years. First boiling gallons of milk and curdling it into chhana, kneading the chhana into smooth balls or other shapes depending on the sweet item, pouring them in sugar syrup and finally getting it ready for consumption. This process can be found in Bangladesh as well as in the eastern part of India, especially in the state of West Bengal and Odisha. 

Farida looked back to the early 90s, during the initial days of trying out the sweet-making process when she would get some time for herself. ("After dropping the kids to school, I would try making sweets alone. In L.A., I also saw Anandalok magazine that came from Kolkata, whose backside had some sweet recipes. I kept on trying,” she said “Then one day, the sweet came out very nice, since then I maintained that recipe.")

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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Courtesy

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Hedy Torres

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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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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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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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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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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.