The Brief

When we first met “Nono” last summer she was living in an encampment under the 405 Freeway, straddling the Los Angeles neighborhood of Palms and Culver City. She’d been living there for several years in a tent, relying on volunteers and people in her community for resources like food, water and harm reduction.

The group that provided these resources to Nono — and dozens of other unhoused people at the encampment — is called PUMA, or Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid. It’s not a formal nonprofit but a group of volunteers who come together every week to provide things like clean needles, antiseptic wipes and Narcan — not to mention homemade burritos.

“They save lives and that's a big deal,” Nono told us in August. “That's really hard to say in, like, homeless communities.”

The idea of harm reduction is not to encourage use. Providing these tools is proven to prevent death or infection among the users, keeping people alive until they can maybe get some more permanent help in the way of housing or substance abuse treatment.

Months after we first met Nono, the encampment where she’d been living was cleared out. As part of that October sweep, Nono was given a voucher for a motel, a key element in L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. Here’s Nono in a video produced by the mayor’s office where she’s referred to as “Noelia.”

“I walked in and literally that was the first time I felt safety and peace and a sense of 'this is the beginning of the rest of my life,'” she tells the camera.

The How to LA team recently caught up with her and others near the motel, which is south of Palms on Sepulveda, to talk about life in the Inside Safe program.

Living in a motel

The Inside Safe motels are independent contractors and people's experiences can vary depending on the location. So one person's experiences won't paint a complete picture of the program, which includes dozens of motels across the city and hundreds of people living inside of them.

On the evening we spent with Nono, at this motel, PUMA volunteers are supplying people with harm reduction tools like glass pipes and needle tips in different lengths — also toothbrushes.

Ndindi Kitonga, founder of PUMA, Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid

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“What brought us here is people are letting us know that they don't have adequate food, that they don't have harm reduction services,” says Ndindi Kitonga, cofounder of PUMA, “and that they are reviving each other, using the Narcan that they have.”

Nono agrees to talk to us, but she asks us to stop recording after a few minutes. She’s lost a lot of weight and says she isn’t feeling great.

“I'm under so much stress because of the security situation over here. It's just ridiculous,” she says. “They kicked my parents out.”

There’s a no visitors rule at this motel.

Nono says she hadn’t seen her parents “in ages.” “What if they’re all I had?” she asks. “Well, I don't even have them, and that was like the one time I’d seen them.”

Kitonga explains: “You cannot have visitors, even if that visitor is your motel mate, meaning someone who lives next door to you.”

Kitonga and her fellow PUMA volunteers have worked with people placed in Inside Safe motels before and says the “no visitor policy” is not always enforced. But it is at this motel.

Sign forbidding visitors to residents of a motel that's part of the Inside Safe Program.

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High hopes

Nono wants the Inside Safe program to work for her.

As you hear in the video from Mayor Bass’s office, she is optimistic about its promise. “This is finally the catapult that I've been waiting for, believing in, dreaming of and it's, it's all because, because of this project,” Nono said in that video.

So far, she says she hasn’t felt that safe.

Nono told us her doctor is concerned by her extreme weight loss, and that she got beat up on the sidewalk in front of the motel as someone stole her bike and wallet. And the “no visitors” rule makes her feel like she doesn't have any autonomy over her life anymore.

A man who says his name is Ivory Michaels joins the conversation with Nono.

“Your family can't visit. You know, you can't have people that may be your therapist,” he says. “They're not felons. These are grown people. What are you trying to do, isolate them?”

Michaels is not staying at the hotel. He lives in a tent across the street. He told us he used to be in the Inside Safe program but had his motel voucher revoked because, he says, he was labeled “defiant” after asking for clean linens and being told he could not have them.

“You're right, I am defiant,” he says. “I'm a grown man. I'm 53 years old. I shouldn't have limitations brought on me. You know? It's angersome.”

The rules being enforced at these places — from no visitors to limits on how many belongings one can bring in — have long been a sore point for some of the folks living in these interim housing programs, whether its through Inside Safe or something like a Tiny Homes project. The criticisms go at least as far back as the height of the pandemic, when unhoused people were moved into hotels and motels to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Let me say this, it's not perfect, it's not meant to be the panacea. But it's one huge, proactive, step forward for those who've been suffering greatly,” says L.A. City Councilman Kevin de León who has a Tiny Home village in his district. “There's criticism that's abundant on Tiny Homes, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.”

A motel in Culver City that's part of the Inside Safe program.

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It's the imperfect part of these programs — the lack of autonomy, the services and the feelings of isolation — that drive mutual aid volunteers like Kitonga to do what they do.

After the encampment where Nono was living in Palms was cleared out by city officials, Kitonga says, “People ended up in three motels. One is off of the 90, so still far away if you consider if you don't have a car, and then a bunch of other people were moved to South L.A.”

So, she adds: “You just have people who've just been in a limbo in motel rooms with very few services, loss of their community and what have you,” she says.

About 1 in 6 people choose to leave the Inside Safe program.

An imperfect solution

The primary goal for officials in L.A. City and L.A. County is to get unhoused people off the streets and, first, into interim housing. The idea being that those much needed services — water, food, a sense of security — will be satisfied once people can get inside.

In theory, that’s when the Band-Aids provided by mutual aid volunteers, like Kitonga, can come off.

“We had to choose between providing those services and organizing those efforts… and actually looking for housing for people,” says L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, “where they could access those services in the context of a motel or a hotel room or a shelter site of some kind.”

Inside Safe is the mayor's flagship interim housing program and, by far, the largest. It's also the city's biggest response in terms of dollars spent. About 8,000 people have obtained a voucher for a room in one of the 38 available motels or hotels in the city.

According to our analysis of data released by the city, these vouchers cost about $8,000 per unit, per month, including additional costs like insurance. Since the program began last December, Inside Safe has incurred a total of $93.8 million in expenses.

People are promised three meals per day in addition to things like hygiene services and the overdose prevention resource Narcan. But so far, these needs are not being fully met.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass acknowledges the drawbacks. “We are building the plane while we fly it,” she says. “Mistakes are made along the way. We're learning about gaps and things that are woefully inadequate.”

Lack of permanent housing

The goal of the program is to offer an alternative to the street while people wait for permanent housing.

That transition has been slow.

The mayor “seemed to really expect that there would be a lot more available [places] for people to transition from the motels and Inside Safe spots to this longer-term housing,” says Nick Gerda, who covers unhoused communities for LAist. But “she’s running into this structural issue of a lack of affordable housing options for people.”

He notes that only “a couple hundred people” have been able to move on to a permanent place to live.

That means, he says, “The motels are largely full. There's much less capacity for people to move off the streets into the motels.”

“I wish we had a much better situation,” says Mayor Bass. “I don't think that moving people into motels, number one, is financially sustainable. But I was not going to accept the idea that while we're doing this stuff that people have to die on the streets. I think a motel room is better than somebody being in the street and possibly raped or killed.”

The Band-Aid remains

The city is not the only player when it comes to housing. Los Angeles County is responsible for providing mental health services, as well as other public health resources. But they spend a lot of money and time on housing, too.

Then there's LAHSA, the Los Angeles Homelessness Authority, the joint agency that sits between L.A. City and L.A. County.

“The bulk of what LAHSA does is refunding non profit groups, that provide the bulk of the homeless services in our system, especially the outreach work,” says Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA's deputy chief external relations officer, “the work that helps people find apartments, the work that helps people stay in apartments.”

Still, there are tens of thousands of Angelenos experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Less than half of them currently have access to one of these temporary housing programs.

“I always compare us to New York City,” says Raman, who was elected to the city council in 2020 and is up for reelection next year. “There are more unhoused people in New York than the county of Los Angeles, but only a couple of thousand … are living on the streets.”

That’s due to a court-mandated effort in the 1980s to have as many available shelter beds as unhoused people in the city.

“We don't have those shelter beds,” says Raman, “and as a result we have the astounding statistic that more people succumb to extreme weather conditions on the streets of Los Angeles than they do in the city of New York.”

Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid volunteers distributing supplies to unhoused and housing insecure people.

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Medical supplies provided by Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid to unhoused and housing insecure people.

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And so — to come full circle — it's these gaps that require the mutual aid groups to step in.

That is, until a more permanent fix can be found.

“I understand that no one individual or no one program or no one approach is actually at the heart or the problem of what's going on here because the social problems really are poverty, gendered violence, structural racism, gentrification,” says PUMA’s Kitonga. “They are the big ‘isms’ so, yes, I understand how and why the mayor is overwhelmed. They underestimated the scale and undertheorized what's going on here.”

The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after Apple removed the service from its app store under demands from the White House.

The suit, filed on Monday in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to declare that the administration violated the First Amendment when it threatened to criminally prosecute the app's developer and pressured Apple to make the app unavailable for download, which the tech company did in October.

Following Apple ejecting ICEBlock, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that "we reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so."

Lawyer Noam Biale, who filed the suit against the administration, said Bondi's remarks show the government illegally pressuring a private company to suppress free speech.

"We view that as an admission that she engaged in coercion in her official role as a government official to get Apple to remove this app," Biale said in an interview with NPR.

The Justice Department did not return a request for comment, but Trump administration officials have said the app puts the lives of ICE agents in danger.

When reached for comment, Apple also did not respond. The lawsuit, which does not name Apple, says the tech giant bowed in the face of political pressure.

"For what appears to be the first time in Apple's nearly fifty-year history, Apple removed a U.S.-based app in response to the U.S. government's demands," according to the suit.

Developer calls immigration crackdown 'abhorrent'

Joshua Aaron, the Austin, Texas-based developer of ICEBlock, said he launched the app as a way to empower those opposed to Trump's immigration crackdown.

"It was just the best idea I had to do everything I could to fight back against what was going on," Aaron said in an interview, describing Trump's immigration enforcement blitz as "abhorrent."

The app allows people to report an ICE agent sighting within a 5 mile radius, similar to how map apps, like Waze and Google and Apple Maps and others, alert drivers to police setting up speed traps. The ICE sighting alerts do not include photographs or videos and expire in four hours.

Yet the Trump administration has portrayed the app as being used to incite violence against ICE agents, something Aaron denies. An analysis of federal court records does not back up the administration's claim that violence against ICE agents has spiked.

Aaron's lawsuit says Bondi is mischaracterizing the purpose of the app.

"Fundamentally, ICEBlock neither enables nor encourages confrontation — it simply delivers time-limited location information to help users stay aware of their surroundings in a responsible and nonviolent way," according to the lawsuit.

Attorney General Bondi, in a July interview with Fox News, suggested Aaron was under investigation and had committed a crime. "We are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that's not protected speech," Bondi said.

To legal experts, ICEBlock is latest "jawboning" example

To First Amendment advocates, the White House's pressure campaign targeting ICEBlock is the latest example of what's known as "jawboning," when government officials wield state power to suppress speech. The Cato Institute calls the practice "censorship by proxy."

ABC's suspension of Jimmy Kimmel after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened regulatory action and Bondi promising a crackdown on hate speech following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk are two other prominent instances.

"The use of a high-level government threat to force a private platform to suppress speech fundamentally undermines the public's right to access information about government activities," said Spence Purnell, a resident senior fellow at R Street, a center-right think tank. "If high-level officials can successfully silence political opposition, it sets a dangerous precedent for the future of free expression in this country."

Genevieve Lakier, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, said the White House's campaign against ICEBlock shows the administration using what has become a familiar playbook: "To use threats of adverse legal and financial consequences, sometimes vague sometimes not so vague, to pressure universities, media companies, law firms, you name it, into not speaking in the ways they like," she said.

One potential weak spot for the lawsuit, however, is a lack of direct evidence that Attorney General Bondi, or other administration officials, made threats against Apple to have the app removed, rather than merely convinced the tech company to do so.

"And government officials do not violate the First Amendment when they persuade private speech platforms to suppress speech because that speech poses a national security risk or is harmful in some other way," Lakier said. "They only violate the First Amendment when they coerce or attempt to coerce the private platform to suppress the speech."

Since Apple kicked ICEBlock out of its app store, it cannot be downloaded now, but those who had it on their phones before the ban can still use it. Being removed from the app store prevents Aaron from sending the app software updates, which could eventually make it glitchy.

Aaron said he hopes the suit will lead to ICEBlock being restored to the iPhone app stores and for a clear message to be sent to the Trump administration that prosecuting him for his role in developing the app would be illegal.

Aaron said he and his legal team "have been preparing for this fight," adding that "we will take it as far as it needs to go to ensure this never happens again."
Copyright 2025 NPR

Twelve FBI agents who were fired this year for taking a knee during racial justice protests in the heated summer of 2020 are suing the Bureau and its director, alleging unlawful retaliation.

The former special agents—who together have nearly 200 years of experience—once received awards for helping disrupt mass shootings, expose foreign spies and thwart cyber attacks.

But they say as elite federal law enforcement agents, they never received training on crowd control, nor did they have riot shields, gas masks, or helmets when they faced down volatile crowds in the streets of Washington, D.C., in June 2020.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington on Monday, described the small group of FBI agents as vastly outnumbered and literally backed against the wall of the National Archives building as unrest swept the country over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Court papers said they kneeled not to reflect a left-wing political point of view, but rather to de-escalate a situation that threatened to spin out of control.

"Mindful of the potentially catastrophic consequences, Plaintiffs knew that a split-second misjudgment by any of them could ignite an already-charged national climate and trigger further violence and unrest," said the lawsuit, filed by former Justice Department prosecutor Mary Dohrmann of the Washington Litigation Group.

Accused of 'lack of impartiality'

The Justice Department inspector general reviewed the incident in 2024 and found no misconduct. But the episode went viral on social media, attracting critics who cast the kneeling as a political act. Before he returned to the White House, President Trump also posted a negative story about the matter.

Soon after new FBI Director Kash Patel joined the Bureau this year, the lawsuit said he began targeting the agents involved in the episode for retaliation. Several of plaintiffs were yanked from supervisory roles at the FBI. Officials launched a new investigation. The matter was still pending when they were all fired in September, shortcutting typical procedures for FBI misconduct probes.

In their dismissal letters, Patel wrote: "You have demonstrated unprofessional conduct and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties, leading to the political weaponization of government."

During his confirmation hearing, Patel told senators he would honor the internal review process. But the lawsuit accuses him of breaking that pledge for his own political purposes.

The abrupt departure of the fired agents disrupted important work, including evidence collection in Utah following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and efforts to support the Trump administration's executive order on "Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful," court papers said.

The case alleges violations of the agents' First Amendment rights to free association and their Fifth Amendment right to due process. They're asking to be reinstated to their jobs and for back pay.

The FBI declined to comment on pending litigation.

Copyright 2025 NPR

A drawn out battle over a city law boosting the minimum wage for tourism workers in Los Angeles seemed like it was finally over this fall when a referendum to overturn it failed to gather enough signatures.

Now there's another twist in the road. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson previously voted to raise airport and hotel worker pay from $22.50 to $30 an hour by 2028, when L.A. will host the Olympics. But in a motion filed Friday, he's proposing that the increase take effect more slowly, instead reaching $30 an hour in 2030.

Harris-Dawson's proposal sparked outcry from hotel workers union Unite Here Local 11 and other labor advocates.

“These workers fought for more than two years to improve their working conditions, only to have the very people who should defend them try to take it all away," Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said in a statement. "It’s heartless, it’s callous, and it deepens the crisis of working poverty that is gripping our city.”

Labor advocates say Harris-Dawson is succumbing to pressure from corporate interests.

Over the summer, a coalition of business leaders filed a ballot proposition to repeal the city business tax, which brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to the city. The L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce told LAist the proposition was partly in response to the City Council boosting the minimum wage for tourism workers.

Unite Here Local 11 filed its own raft of proposals, including raising the minimum wage citywide and requiring Angelenos to vote on building new hotels and event center developments. This war via ballot proposition led city leaders to encourage both sides to come to a compromise.

A spokesperson for Harris-Dawson said the city is currently in talks with business and labor interests, and declined to comment further on his recent motion. Mayor Karen Bass's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The motion now goes to council committees on tourism and jobs.