The Brief

As L.A. residents continue to rank homelessness as a top concern, taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Mayor Karen Bass’ signature program Inside Safe to help get people off the streets and into motels.

Now an LAist review has found major errors in a recent data release that tracks where encampments have been cleared and how many people were brought inside from each council district.

It comes as some council members have questioned a lack of details about how the mayor’s office chooses which encampments to offer motel rooms to.

The data was the first — and so far only — detailed public listing of each encampment operation for Inside Safe, a program that started a year and a half ago.

About the data and errors

The data was provided to the City Council back in April by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), after the council ordered officials to gather it.

As LAist was analyzing the data last week, we reached out to all 15 council offices to verify the accuracy. That’s when problems with the data were pointed out to LAist by officials — problems that hadn’t previously been acknowledged publicly.

Click to compare the spreadsheets

Officials who prepared the spreadsheet acknowledge it had the following errors:

• It incorrectly labeled encampments located in multiple districts as only being in a single district. In one of those operations, 116 people were incorrectly labeled as all coming inside from Council District 1. The vast majority — about 100 — were actually in Council District 13, according to that district’s spokesperson. 
• It double-counted about 50 people who left Inside Safe motels, returned to an encampment, and then re-entered an Inside Safe motel.
• It listed incorrect dates for when encampment clearings took place. Among the problems: It showed an Inside Safe operation as starting before the mayor took office. The program didn’t launch until after she was sworn in.

Officials at the Homeless Services Authority acknowledged the errors in an interview with LAist and issued a correction this week for the City Council. The agency is overseen by Bass and other officials appointed by the mayor and county supervisors.

LAHSA official owns the errors

“I will own the errors in that report,” said Bevin Kuhn, who has been overseeing data at LAHSA on an interim basis since February. That’s when the previous data chief — Emily Vaughn Henry — left, before this data was compiled.

Kuhn was brought into the top data role at LAHSA by its CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who formerly worked with Kuhn at the Westside service provider St. Joseph Center.

Kuhn said the data was compiled as she was starting in her new role, and that she did not take the time to thoroughly review the data before it went out for the council.

“This report unfortunately fell off my personal radar,” Kuhn said.

“There was nothing nefarious about it, and there was nothing hidden there.”

LAHSA fixed the errors, and the corrected report sent to the city on Tuesday is “100% accurate,” Kuhn said.

Kuhn said she’s learned to communicate if deadlines aren’t realistic, and to do a better job of educating staff to prevent data errors.

Adams Kellum said she believes overall that LAHSA’s data is much more accurate than in the past, but that mistakes do still happen. She said she’s been working to get LAHSA staff to feel more comfortable asking for more time to make sure data reports are correct, and owning up to mistakes.

“We know nothing will get better, and we won't be able to hone our interventions if we can't tell you what's working and what's not,” she told LAist.

Timing: Homeless count numbers coming soon

LAist discovered the errors as LAHSA prepares to release the widely-anticipated homeless count results on Friday.

Asked why the public should trust the point in time results, Adams Kellum said it’s important to note that the data for that is overseen and validated by researchers at the University of Southern California.

She acknowledged “data issues across our entire homeless delivery system,” noting that LAist has reported on many of them.

“We've made great strides,” Adams Kellum said, adding that Kuhn “is making a great improvement in our ability to stand behind the numbers and also share with you where there's gaps.”

“That's that transparency that we're trying to get to.”

The backstory

The data was collected under a City Council order in February, which was initiated by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.

“I requested the data because this information was not forthcoming from the mayor's office when we were requesting these reports” previously, Rodriguez told LAist in an interview.

“My big problem is that there was a lot of dollars being spent, a lot of money being allocated, but there hasn't been a lot of accountability for who's getting what money, what is it going to — like, breaking down and distilling more of those details,” Rodriguez told LAist in an interview.

The mayor’s office should be ensuring transparency and accuracy for data about the mayor’s key program, Rodriguez said.

“The administrator of the program should be able to account for how the program operates and where the deployments are.”

LAist requested an interview with Bass and her top homelessness advisor, Lourdes Castro Ramirez. They have not responded.

Why there are still unanswered questions

Many City Council members say Inside Safe is making a real difference in the lives of their constituents — housed and unhoused alike. More than 2,700 people have come inside under the program, as of the latest data, of whom about 1,900 are still known to be in shelter or housing.

Still, lack of clarity around how decisions get made persists, which the City Council’s directive to collect data in February noted. The strategy “remains open to further definition,” states the motion.

Asked how encampments are prioritized for Inside Safe, Mayor Bass’ office pointed LAist to a short description that says factors include “council district priorities, voluntary participation, encampment-specific needs (e.g., RVs, number of residents, size of encampment, safety/hazard issues, multiple jurisdictions), availability of interim housing, and service provider capacity."

Her office did not respond to follow-up questions, including what "council district priorities" means and how they’re decided.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who chairs the council’s budget committee, called for “more transparency and accountability” about Inside Safe decisions in an interview with LAist.

He credited the mayor’s office with trying to prioritize encampments for Inside Safe in “a rational way,” but said “the decision process is not necessarily clear or inclusive of the entire council.”

“I think they're just trying to address a crisis. I don't think they have a clearly delineated process,” Blumenfield said.

The City Council is now stepping up its push for transparency about that. As part of its budget approval for the new fiscal year, the council is requiring detailed data about each Inside Safe operation on a regular basis — including, for the first time, how encampments were chosen.

As for the data errors uncovered by LAist, he said LAHSA’s data quality has been a longstanding problem and one that’s still “a big concern” for him.

LAHSA officials “certainly have asked us for more money for admin, for data, and we've provided that every time we've been asked,” he added.

“And we're spending a lot on making sure that they're resourced to provide the data.”

Tell LAist: The state of homelessness in your neighborhood

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles city employees cannot hold second jobs with federal immigration enforcement agencies.

City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who represents District 7, introduced the motion to establish the policy, which was unanimously approved by the council on Wednesday, with one member absent.

“Families can trust the public servants that are employed with the city of Los Angeles to not be engaged in other employment activities that will compromise their work and their role and the level of trust that we need to exemplify here in this city,” Rodriguez said during the press conference.

When The LA Local asked whether there was any evidence that city employees had been moonlighting in immigration raids, Rodriguez and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto both said no. But they emphasized that the city needed to remain clear about such boundaries with federal agencies that have been rapidly recruiting to deliver on the federal government’s deportation promises.

Rodriguez first introduced the bill late last year after the Trump administration sent federal immigration agents to conduct raids and eventually deployed troops to quell widespread protests in Los Angeles.

During a press conference held at City Hall before the vote, Rodriguez said that the policy ensures city employees stay focused on LA’s priorities and values. She said the federal government’s aggressive immigration enforcement conflicts with the responsibilities of the city’s public servants.

“Our employees are not going to serve dual masters,” Rodriguez said. “That is a critical step to building back whatever trust may have been lost in the last 12 months. We stand behind our immigrant communities. We stand behind the fact that local law enforcement is here to ensure public safety.”

The motion amends the city’s Municipal Code, building on an exemption for city employees taking outside jobs without prior approval from their department’s administrators. The previous code did not address whether city employees could work for federal immigration agencies, including law enforcement and administrative work.

Feldstein Soto, who joined Rodriguez at City Hall before the vote, said that Angelenos deserve to seek services from any city department with confidence that the person behind the counter “does not have an off-duty employer whose job it is to deport you or your family. And this ordinance ensures that’s the case.”

The policy applies to anyone working for the city full or part-time, as well as appointed officers and retirees returning for short-term work. It bars them from compensated work investigating, enforcing or assisting in civil immigration enforcement outside of their city employment.

Feldstein Soto said employees who violate the policy would face discipline and could be terminated.

Similar policies have been introduced in other jurisdictions, including one in February in the California State Legislature by State Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez and Sen. Maria Elena Durazo. Rodriguez’s measure is among the first adopted by a city council in the nation. She said it is unique because it applies to all jobs, while some have focused only on restricting law enforcement employees.

“We’re making history here in the city of Los Angeles that is setting an excellent example for other communities and other cities to follow across the nation,” Rodriguez said.

At a protest this month outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Adelanto, advocates derided what they said are substandard conditions for the roughly 2,000 people imprisoned at the Adelanto campus.

Multiple protesters said the detention center would be more aptly described as a “concentration camp,” drawing parallels to some of the darkest moments in U.S. and world history.

For protesters who opt to use such a charged phrase to refer to immigrant detention, doing so isn’t just a matter of accuracy; above all, they seek to prevent further harm.

What life is like inside Adelanto

Current and former detainees say immigrants at the ICE processing center experience rotten food, inadequate medical attention and punitive isolation.

Immigrant rights groups have filed a lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking to “end the inhumane and illegal conditions” at this facility. The lawsuit describes Adelanto as an unsanitary place where “disease and illness are rampant.”

“Mold grows on bathroom and dormitory walls,” the lawsuit says. “Individuals across various dormitories [have] contracted an infectious skin disease called a staph infection — and more than a dozen detained individuals [have been] hospitalized.”

In recent weeks, two local fathers died following detention at the facility.

What is the state’s role at Adelanto?

California attorney general Rob Bonta, whose office is mandated to monitor conditions inside the state’s detention centers, filed an amicus brief last week bolstering the immigrant rights groups’ claims.

During inspections at Adelanto, Bonta said in a press statement, his team witnessed "shockingly inadequate medical care, a failure to accommodate people with disabilities, disturbingly unsafe and unsanitary conditions and a lack of basic necessities.”

Bonta also said detainees have reported “denied access to facility phones for prolonged periods,” which impeded their ability to contact their families and legal counsel.

What is the Trump administration’s position on Adelanto?

The federal government has denied claims of substandard conditions. In a press statement issued after the death of a detainee, ICE said it is “committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.”

“Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay,” the statement continues. “This is the best health care tha[t] many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to expand its network of immigrant prisons across the U.S., even as the number of people who’ve died in ICE custody grows.

What protesters fear

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network staged its recent protest outside Adelanto, in partnership with sister organizations across Southern California. In a message to protesters ahead of the event, the group referred to the detention center in Adelanto as a “concentration camp for immigrants.” Out in the Mojave desert, others also made connections to the past.

“ I'm here today fighting for the fathers, the mothers and [the] community members who have been abducted,” said N. Suzuki, a member of Nikkei Progressives, an intergenerational community organization based in Little Tokyo.

“This is a moment in history, much like it was for Japanese Americans during World War II,” they added, referencing the U.S. incarceration of more than 120,000 residents of Japanese descent. “Solidarity from the masses is critical.”

N. Suzuki and Amy Oba carried a poster with an excerpt from Civilian Exclusion Order No. 69, a 1942 army directive forcing people of Japanese ancestry — most of them U.S. citizens — to leave their homes.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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Elisa Schwartz, a resident of the San Fernando Valley, traveled nearly 100 miles to join protesters in Adelanto. She also referred to the detention centers as “camps” and said that as a Jewish person, it felt “heavy” to be there.

Schwartz condemned the Trump administration’s rhetoric around undocumented immigrants, including efforts to paint them as a mass of criminals.

“I remember hearing this from my mother when I was a kid,” she said. “‘[When you] other people, you can start to hurt them. Once you start to hurt them, you herd them and you can destroy them.’ And this is what this is — make no mistake.”

Does it matter what Adelanto is called?

Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, backs protesters’ use of the phrase to refer to conditions inside U.S. immigration detention facilities.

Her book, published in 2017, looks at how the idea of concentration camps came into being; how these places led to extermination centers like Auschwitz in World War II; and what’s happened to the idea of “concentration camps” since then.

To write her book, Pitzer conducted research in two dozen countries, across four continents. She also spoke with current and former detainees from various camps, as well as guards. All this was anchored in years of archival work.

In One Long Night, Pitzer defines “concentration camps” as the mass detention of civilians “without due process or a real trial, on the basis of identity — usually political, racial, ethnic or religious” she told LAist.

When it comes to the mass detention of civilians, she added, “Who they are is more important than anything they've done.”

Pitzer said she’s not interested in forcing anyone to use the phrase “concentration camps” to refer to U.S. immigrant detention centers. Instead, she explained why doing so is valuable: As protesters at Adelanto aimed to convey, the phrase can help others “recognize that term as an escalation of the usual state of detention.”

Given that some 70,000 immigrants are currently imprisoned across the U.S., she added, “the current potential for harm is vast.”

Those who support the Trump administration’s mass deportation project might be inclined to say that undocumented immigrants are being detained because they crossed the border without authorization, Pitzer noted, and that “there is something that they've done.” But breaching immigration law is a civil offense, not criminal, she said. Plus, “historically speaking,” when governments detain civilians en masse, they devote a lot of time and resources to criminalizing them.

“In Nazi Germany, for instance, [the government] spent years criminalizing German Jews so that they literally could not be there legally. The whole goal was to turn them into ‘illegal aliens,’” she said.

In Pitzer’s view, “It's clear that people who are being rounded up [in the U.S.] are being detained because of skin color, because it's suspected that they're Latino.”

She pointed to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence in an ongoing case on immigration stops, wherein he gave federal agents the green light to continue making those stops based on factors like “speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent” and “apparent race or ethnicity.” That text, Pitzer said, “starts to clarify why [detentions are] actually happening and why [this] does fit the definition of concentration camps.”

“When people hear the phrase ‘concentration camps,’ they get a little bit confused, and they immediately think of death camps and extermination centers,” she added. “But what they might not realize is that all around the globe ... there were many, many other camps that never became extermination centers. Yet, they were still terrible places.”

In Argentina, in Chile and in the Soviet Union, she said, “those early camps looked quite a bit like some [immigrant detention centers in] the U.S.”

Camps in each of those nations had their “own local cultural conditions,” Pitzer added. But many of their features — including the lack of access to medical care, sanitation and healthy food for detained civilians, and starting with “people being kidnapped off the street by masked gunmen” — are not unlike what’s happening in the U.S., she said.

Libby Rainey contributed to this story.

The “No Kings” protest movement is planning a third national day of action this Saturday in response to the war in Iran and continued immigration enforcement.

More than 50 events are taking place in the L.A. metro area alone, with the largest planned in downtown Los Angeles, where over 100,000 people are expected to attend, according to organizers.

“Many of the organizations that have coordinated with us are sending feeder marches or caravans to attend the rally in downtown L.A.,” said Nick Miller, a press coordinator for 50501 SoCal, which is part of the No Kings coalition.

During the first No Kings protest in June, thousands in downtown Los Angeles marched in the largely peaceful protest before the LAPD issued a dispersal order and employed less than lethal weapons on the crowd, saying people were “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects."

For this Saturday, an LAPD spokesperson told LAist the department is prepared for the event and "have sufficient resources to respond.”

Law enforcement in Long Beach, where a march is planned, said they're ready as well.

“If you are participating in a demonstration, please abide by all traffic laws. Criminal activity and violence will not be tolerated,” said Jordan McGinleywith the Long Beach Police Department.

There are more than 3,000 demonstrations planned for Saturday nationwide.
Here’s a map of all No Kings events taking place nationally.

L.A. and O.C. demonstrations

Dozens of protests are planned in Los Angeles and Orange counties, including at these locations:

• Anaheim: 2 to 5 p.m. at La Palma Park
• Pasadena: 11 to 1:30 p.m. at Pasadena City College
• Downtown Los Angeles: 2 to 5:30 p.m. at Los Angeles City Hall/Gloria Molina Grand Park
• Long Beach: 12 to 2 p.m. at East Ocean Boulevard & Temple Avenue
• Santa Monica: 11 to 1 p.m. at Palisades Park
• Santa Ana: 10:30 to 12:30 p.m. at South Bristol Street & West MacArthur Boulevard
• Malibu: 12 to 1 p.m. at 23519 West Civic Center Way
• Burbank: 1 to 3 p.m. at Abraham Lincoln Park
• Santa Clarita: 10 to 12 p.m. at 24292 Valencia Blvd at the corner of McBean Pkwy
• Monrovia: 10 to 12 p.m. at Library Park
• Torrance: 10:30 to 12:30 p.m. at Torrance City Hall
• West Hollywood: 11 to 2 p.m. at West Hollywood Park