The Brief

L.A. officials moved forward with an encampment clearing in Hollywood on Friday, after payment problems to homeless service providers caused a week-and-a-half delay. Over 25 people accepted motel rooms from the encampment as part of Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program, according to a spokesperson for the mayor.

An LAist reporter was there for the first hour of the operation in front of the Sunset Sound recording studio early Friday, and spoke with unhoused people, Mayor Karen Bass and other city officials.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (second from left) at the encampment operation in front of Sunset Sound in Hollywood on Friday, May 31, 2024.

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Nick Gerda / LAist

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Unhoused people said they were feeling hopeful and looking forward to moving indoors.

“I'm pretty excited about this. This is looking pretty promising,” said Sean Caffey, a sculptor and cancer survivor who’s been living on the streets with his dog. He was missing almost all of his teeth, and said they were knocked out when he was beaten up by people who stole his sculpting tools.

“It's harder than you think to get housing,” he said. “I've been trying to get a house for like a minute, like at least a year.” Bass told him the city would make sure he gets dental care.

“I'm excited to shower and to have a bed and clean clothes,” said another man, who gave his first name as Adam and didn’t provide a last name.

Bass was there for over an hour, going tent to tent to talk with unhoused people, as well as outreach workers and reporters, and waved goodbye to the first bus of unhoused people who left for the motels.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass waves to the first bus of unhoused people leaving an encampment in front of Sunset Sound in Hollywood and heading to city-provided motel rooms on May 31, 2024.

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“No human being should live like this,” the mayor said of the city’s encampments.

“Even though it takes a while [to move people indoors], and even though it's expensive, it is far more expensive in terms of human lives compromised, and in terms of the businesses, the safety, everything else, to leave people on the street,” she added.

Bass announced to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce earlier this week that a series of large encampments in the area would be going away over the next month.

A worker removes items from an encampment in front of Sunset Sound in Hollywood on Friday, May 31, 2024, after unhoused people began to be bused to motel rooms.

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Nick Gerda / LAist

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How many people have come inside under the mayor’s program? 

Bass acknowledged challenges around service providers being stretched to their limits, which the nonprofits say stems from being shortchanged and paid late by the city and county’s homelessness agency, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“We've been working so fast, we've done so many of these [Inside Safe operations], that we've really pushed to the limit the community based organizations,” Bass told reporters Friday.

L.A.’s homeless population has surged in recent years, with the latest count showing 32,680 people living outdoors. The latest report posted by the city, with data through March 15, shows the Inside Safe program has brought 2,482 people indoors since the mayor started it in December 2022. Among them, the report says 78% are still sheltered or housed.

As part of the current fiscal year budget, approved a year ago, the city council required two data reports about Inside Safe each month. The latest report on the city’s website is two months old.

Judge David O. Carter has scheduled a hearing for next Thursday to press for more frequent public updates about Inside Safe spending. Carter is overseeing L.A.’s biggest homelessness case, in which downtown business and property owners are pushing for faster city action to shelter people and clear encampments.

A delay over payment problems

The Hollywood encampment clearing was delayed by a week and a half over late payments by the city and county’s joint homeless services agency — a problem that exploded into public view recently.

At the county Board of Supervisors’ meeting last week, multiple homeless services providers said they have to take out loans, and are at risk of not being able to pay their staff, due to delayed payments from the agency for contracted services. They warned officials last week that they’re at the “breaking point” over the problem and faced possible cuts to staff and services. The supervisors and Mayor Bass vowed to work quickly to fix the issue.

The Sunset Sound operation was scheduled for last Tuesday, but the nonprofit that would serve people at motels indicated it would be unable to serve people at the motels because of the payment delays by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

That issue has since been worked out, according to PATH and city officials.

LAist asked the mayor about the payment problems delaying Friday’s operation.

“This system is broken in a lot of different ways, and it has been for years. What I believed when I came in office, and I believe today, this is an emergency. We have to get people off the streets immediately, while at the same time we're fixing the system,” she responded.

“But we did come to a little bit of a crisis point, because again we had stretched the system so far. So we had to take a step back for a minute, fix the financing, make sure that the community based organizations got their payments.”

What services will people receive?

The people who accepted motel rooms Friday were bused to two motels served by PATH under a city-funded contract.

There, people will get three meals a day, on-site security and have access to case managers on site every day from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., said Sasha Morozov, who oversees that work as PATH’s regional director.

The case managers, she told LAist, build relationships and help people with what they need, like getting an ID and other documents together to qualify for permanent housing, or access to a vaccine for their pet.

“Our goal at PATH is to end homelessness,” she said. “That's our mission.”

Online safety groups have criticized OpenAI and child advocacy group Common Sense Media’s jointly proposed ballot measure creating chatbot guardrails for kids, saying it would shield tech companies from accountability.

The California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, or CITED, and Tech Oversight California — two groups that have sponsored anti-deepfake and AI laws — circulated a letter shared with lawmakers on Wednesday addressing the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act, announced by co-sponsors OpenAI and Common Sense Media in January.

“Though seemingly well-intended, the measure would exempt AI companies from the robust framework of laws already established in California to give consumers meaningful protections,” the letter states.

The letter warned that the proposed measure could undermine age and privacy protections, in part by narrowly defining child protections to “severe harms,” effectively shielding AI companies from liability related to children’s mental health.

“This definition fails to account for mental or emotional distress caused by companion chatbots or exposure to age-inappropriate content that may contribute to psychological harm,” the letter reads.

John Bennett, initiative director of CITED, told KQED that the definitions “raised a lot of alarm bells in our heads, because we didn’t think it was sufficiently protective of children.”

The first alarm bell, Bennett said, was the fact that Common Sense and its CEO, Jim Steyer, negotiated alone with OpenAI, leaving out the fold of child and consumer advocates that had previously been working together to lobby for strong laws with lawmakers like Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), chair of the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee and author of a closely-watched AI child safety bill ultimately vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last legislative session.

In a statement sent to KQED on Thursday, Common Sense Media did not directly address the concerns outlined in the letter, but wrote the measure “will be the strongest, most comprehensive youth AI safety law in the country, whether it’s passed by the voters or the legislature.”

That said, in his remarks introducing the joint effort on Jan. 9, 2026, Steyer presented his approach as primarily strategic, saying he would use any political tool available to get most of what he wants on behalf of children and their parents.

“I cannot begin to know where Mr. Steyer’s mind actually is at,” Bennett said, adding that he was perplexed by this initiative nonetheless. “Usually, you try and introduce something that’s extremely strong — some might think overly strong. Then you use that as a negotiating arm within the legislature.”

In the absence of comprehensive, effective child protection legislation from Washington, California has helped lead the way on kids’ and teens’ tech privacy laws, as well as general consumer-focused tech safety laws. As a result, child advocates pay a lot of attention, early and often, to the rough and tumble of California AI-focused politics.

Outside the U.S., Australia and Spain have rolled out aggressive restrictions on youth smartphone use, including banning social media use for children under 16. Some advocates speculate the fear of a similar ban in California prompted OpenAI, which did not respond with a comment in time for this story, to reach out to Common Sense Media and negotiate a compromise.

Bennett has another theory. As with other ballot measures, if voters approve it, any changes will require a two-thirds vote of the legislature, making stronger, more effective regulation later difficult, if not impossible. “We can’t just come back and change this in a year or two if we see that there are new dangers and new harms that are coming about because technology’s evolving so quickly,” he said.

The Parents & Kids Safe AI Act is still in the signature-gathering phase and has not yet qualified for the November 2026 ballot. Supporters have said they expect to start collecting the requisite 546,651 valid signatures from registered California voters this month.

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Feb. 6, 2026.

Bad Bunny isn’t just topping charts — he’s landed on college syllabi.

Now, as the Puerto Rican superstar is set to take the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show this Sunday, a Cal State LA professor is inviting the wider community to unpack what the moment says about Latinidad.

José G. Anguiano, a professor and department chair of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, is hosting a plática on Monday to reflect on how Latinos are celebrated and sometimes overlooked during major sports culture moments.

The selection of Bad Bunny as the Super Bowl halftime performer has sparked much interest and controversy, with some perceiving the artist — who only sings in Spanish — as not American or mainstream enough to headline the show.

As part of the conversation — “Pláticas con Profes: ¿Bad Bunny ‘Too Latino’ for the Super Bowl?”— Anguiano wants to explore why some Americans see him as a controversial pick.

Bad Bunny not falling in line with “white American Anglo culture” doesn’t make him any less American, said Anguiano.

The professor reminds the public that Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is an American citizen. The fact that he speaks Spanish, “I would argue is a very American thing,” he said.

“Given the current administration, I think that’s part of the conversation about why he’s so important,” Anguiano said.

Anguiano is also gearing up to teach a special topics course on Bad Bunny in the spring of 2027 at Cal State LA. Bad Bunny, Anguiano said, is an entry point to learn about broader cultural history.

He thinks of the song “El Apagón,” which sheds light on power outages, government corruption and the displacement of native Puerto Ricans. In “Yo Perreo Sola,” which Bad Bunny dedicated to “those who desire to dance alone and safely in the club,” Anguiano finds ways to talk about gender and sexuality.

“I know some people don’t take popular music as a serious subject, but … there’s really important things that are happening through music,” Anguiano said.

Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego ended their gender affirming hormone therapy on Friday to people under 19, pending a legal challenge from Attorney General Rob Bonta.

The closure leaves hundreds of patients in limbo at Rady Children’s Health, the largest pediatric hospital system in California.

Growing restrictions and fewer options

When San Diego father Brett heard about the Rady Children’s Health closure, he was shocked.

“The whole world kind of dropped out from under me,” he said.

Brett had been preparing for this after a spate of closures and restrictions last year among California providers and nationwide. But he said he wasn’t ready for the feelings of anger and abandonment that soon followed.

Brett’s son started getting hormone treatment at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego about a year and a half ago. Brett says they were happy with their endocrinologist, who was “overwhelmingly loving” — and he was also comforted by her assurances that they could go off of the hormone treatments if needed.

Before the announcement, he said his family had no plans to cease hormone treatments before they got the news. But he doesn’t know where he’ll get his son’s testosterone now.

The legal challenge ahead

Bonta filed suit on behalf of the state seeking a permanent injunction citing that the hospital broke its contract when it guaranteed the health care system would maintain the same level of gender-affirming care through 2034.

Though the lawsuit is a narrow one that only applies to Rady Children Health, it was still celebrated by LGBTQ groups and organizers in Orange County.

A CHOC spokesperson told LAist at the time that it would address Bonta’s concerns “through the legal process.”

Bonta filed the suit in the state Superior Court of San Diego County. The court has yet to issue a ruling on Bonta’s request for an injunction.

Providers in California and nationwide feel fear

Experts have said this follows actions from the Trump administration to restrict gender-affirming care through a variety of enforcement mechanisms. The most recent action threatened to pull Medicare and Medicaid funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming hormones and surgeries to minors.

“People go into pediatrics or adolescent medicine because they care about kids, not because they wanna have some giant fight with the federal government about an existential question of whether their hospital or their clinic can stay open,” said Kellan Baker, senior advisor for health policy at the think tank Movement Advancement Project.

Baker pointed to statistics that hospitals nationwide receive about 50% of their funding from Medicare and Medicaid. At some, such as Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, that percentage is even higher.

Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality, is also worried about whether the federal government will use these same policies to restrict funding for areas like vaccine and cancer research.

“ This is like forcing a firefighter not to use water because the government doesn't like who lives in the burning house,” they said. “Those flames will spread and everyone will get burned.”

The Trump administration weighs in

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that gender affirming care did “not meet professionally recognized standards of health care.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association have all opposed that view, saying that this care is evidence-based and necessary for trans mental health.

Families forced to make other plans

Other providers, including telehealth providers, can step in to fill the gap, though some families say they aren’t a replacement for in-person services.

“ We'll do everything in our power to protect providers from this large scale efforts of criminalization of care that remains legal,” said Sheldon, who says they’ve been in touch with hundreds of medical providers in California and across the country.

For his part, Brett understands the position his doctors are in and doesn’t blame them for the hospital’s decisions. But his family is now considering moving abroad.

It’ll be a hard pill for Brett to swallow, since he can trace his ancestry back to a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“There's a feeling of having to flee this country,” he said. “ And that means leaving the country that we were all born in, that we all love, that we believed would protect every citizen.”