The Brief

The 2024 Los Angeles homeless count brought what appeared to be a rare piece of good news: a 10% drop in unsheltered homelessness inside city limits.

The decline was a bright spot after years of growing homelessness across L.A. County. Since 2018, each homeless count for the region — a requirement for seeking federal funding — brought more bad news. Year after year, even as the region spent more and more money on the homelessness crisis, the number of unhoused people kept going up.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the outgoing chief executive of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, have pointed to the drop in 2024 as a sign that major homelessness initiatives are working.

The results of the count surprised some Los Angeles residents and advocates who said the celebrated drop in homelessness doesn’t match what they’ve seen on the streets.

To better understand how LAHSA reached their conclusions, LAist requested the policies and raw data behind the official results announced last June.

We found the 2024 homeless count was complicated by policy changes at LAHSA, shifting guidelines and technical problems — with marked differences in how people were counted in the city of L.A. and in other areas of L.A. County.

How the count works

Volunteers and LAHSA staff canvassed the county across more than 3,000 census tracts covering nearly 4,000 square miles, entering their observations on a phone app and, when the technology didn’t work as intended, on paper forms filled out by hand.

Ultimately, each count is an estimate based on a “point in time,” when homelessness is observed by volunteers throughout the region. The raw data gathered is then reviewed by LAHSA officials for verification. The count’s results typically come out months later.

Marina Flores, left, and Helde Pereira, right, document homeless people seen during LAHSA's annual count earlier this year.

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LAist

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LAist’s analysis found LAHSA excluded more observations recorded by volunteers looking for people living outside or signs of homelessness in 2024 than the previous year. LAist also found LAHSA excluded significantly more observations from census tracts within the city of L.A. in 2024 than those in the rest of the county.

Let’s take a closer look at what we found.

People and dwellings

The unsheltered homeless count is based on two categories: People observed to be unhoused and temporary dwellings where people appear to be staying, like tents, encampments, RVs and other vehicles. When all of the observations are validated by LAHSA, a separate annual survey conducted by University of Southern California is used to estimate how many people are living in those temporary dwellings.

• In the 2023 count, LAHSA included 87% of all observation data that volunteers across the region had entered through the phone app. The other 13% was removed from the count and not replaced by data from paper backup forms.
• In the 2024 count, just 81% of app data from volunteers was included — in raw numbers that meant about 2,300 more observations of people and dwellings were dropped than the year before.

Inside and outside city limits

LAist also examined observations by jurisdiction and found:

• 87% of observations made on the app outside the Los Angeles city limits were included in the final 2024 count, similar to the inclusion rates for both the city and the rest of the county in the 2023 count.
• In contrast, 78% of observations inside the city of L.A. made it to the final count in 2024. LAist found about 2,300 more observations were dropped from the city’s count, accounting for almost all of the additional observations LAHSA removed countywide.

What we know about the observations LAHSA removed

LAist found nine areas — all inside Los Angeles city limits — where more than 100 observations of homelessness were removed from LAHSA’s preliminary totals of app and paper data by the time the count was finalized.

LAHSA officials said that, in many areas, the final count was higher than what was observed in preliminary data. When they did exclude data, LAHSA officials said it was due to errors in the entries that, in some cases, made the preliminary data “unambiguously invalid.”

“When you’re working with such a large number of volunteers, human error is part of the process,” LAHSA spokesperson Ahmad Chapman said. “LAHSA staff accounts for this and are thoughtful throughout the process as we look at the data.”

We found the agency made decisions about what data to exclude on a case-by-case basis and lacked documentation explaining some of their decisions.

“LAHSA employs the data reconciliation process to improve the accuracy of the Homeless Count, not to fulfill a narrative,” Chapman said in response to our analysis.

Chapman said the count is meant to be an estimate.

“It’s important to note that Homeless Count data is just one measure of our system. Albeit an important one, it plays its own specific and limited role,” Chapman said.

Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, responded to LAist’s findings in a statement, saying that the 2024 homeless count results “were certified by the federal government and there is still more work to be done."

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who sat on the city’s housing and homelessness committee until the end of 2024, is one local official questioning the results of the annual count.

“ Are we measuring apples to apples?” Rodriguez said in an interview with LAist. “Or are people feeling compelled to manufacture reductions to convey to the public that they're actually garnering some type of progress.”

The data and discrepancies

By the first night of the homeless count, Bass had been in office for a little over a year. Her administration had targeted homelessness with a state of emergency issued on Day One of her term and already spent hundreds of millions tackling the problem.

The 2024 count was the first big test to see if the mayor’s initiatives were working.

Volunteers and LAHSA staff fanned across Los Angeles County starting on Jan. 23, 2024. The count took three days, with most of the work taking place at night.

Volunteers were given a brief training on how to identify signs of homelessness and were told to mark those observations in an app made by Esri, a software company based in Redlands.

The volunteers were instructed to mark observations only in their assigned census tract. GPS from the app would help discard observations made outside the assigned areas to prevent duplication.

Technology problems popped up shortly after volunteers arrived at their designated counting areas and persisted all three nights of the count, according to LAHSA’s reports on the 2024 count and volunteers interviewed by LAist.

Several volunteers told LAist they had trouble logging into the app and had to wait hours to start counting.

Data entry errors were common, according to two volunteers interviewed by LAist.

For example, volunteers in North Hollywood used the app to count more than 50 people living outdoors near a homeless shelter operated by the nonprofit LA Family Housing.

LAHSA officials say the volunteer site coordinator at LA Family Housing checked a box on the app’s review page indicating that no unhoused people were counted. LAHSA deferred to that statement rather than the data gathered by volunteers, even though data was submitted on the app, in this case.

A representative for LA Family Housing confirmed the site coordinator had made an error when they checked the box in the app and recalled computer screen glitches.

Dozens of unhoused people live in the census tract, near the LA Family Housing shelter site.

LAist visited the area and spoke with residents. Timothy Woodhead has been living in a makeshift shelter there for years and is skeptical L.A. is making progress on homelessness.

“Maybe they've gotten a lot more people inside the tiny homes and stuff like that, but there are still plenty of homeless people out here,” Woodhead said. “They kicked me out [of LA Family Housing] like two years ago, and I've just been right here next to them, in the streets. ”

Timothy Woodhead has been living in makeshift shelters in North Hollywood for years. In 2024, LAHSA didn't include Woodhead and his unhoused neighbors in their annual Homeless Count due to an error.

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Two volunteers told LAist there was no easy way to fix app entries made in error, so they relied on paper maps as a backup.

According to count data, LAHSA relied on data from paper backup maps for more than 400 of the 3,249 assigned areas counted in 2024.

But data recorded on the paper wasn’t always included in the final, publicly released count data, even when volunteers intended it to be used in place of app data.

David Hirschman and his wife have regularly volunteered for the homeless count since before LAHSA unveiled its first counting app in 2022.

“ They have made improvements on the app over the years, but my experience was not a great user experience, not a great user interface,” Hirschman said, recalling the 2024 count. “We had to use the paper and highlighters to mark where we went because the app just wasn't good.”

Hirschman was assigned to count a several-block stretch of Chatsworth, where dozens of unhoused Angelenos were living in tents and RVs near a county social services office.

“There's literally blocks and blocks where it's just wall-to-wall homeless folks,” he told LAist. “There’s so many, it’s hard to count accurately.”

Hirschman and other volunteers recorded more than 180 observations of homelessness in the mobile app for this area and 105 on the paper form, but none were recorded in final data from LAHSA.

Chapman, the LAHSA spokesperson, told LAist this was an error caused by the volunteer site coordinator in Chatsworth, who had submitted a note in the app dashboard indicating that the area’s homeless count should come from a paper back-up form instead of the app.

But Chapman said the Chatsworth observations recorded on paper were not included in a separate spreadsheet LAHSA used to record what was written on the paper forms. LAHSA was not able to investigate every instance where contradictory data was provided and relied on the spreadsheet “to complete the job in time as accurately and defensibly as possible,” Chapman told LAist. In this case, that led to none of the area’s observations being included in the final count.

In a 2024 report to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors weeks after the count took place, LAHSA officials said issues with the app “increased doubts and concerns about the technology and reliability of the data.”

Bevin Kuhn, who is responsible for the management of homeless count data as LAHSA’s deputy chief analytics officer, told LAist that the issues they faced in 2024 with the app are now fixed, explaining that they were addressed in a custom app developed with Esri for the 2025 count.

Chapman told LAist in a separate email that all count data was recorded on this app in 2025, which “alleviated the need for a reconciliation process as complex as in 2024.”

What happened after the initial count?

After three days of data entry in January 2024, LAHSA officials moved to the next step: cleaning the data by removing duplicates or mistaken entries.

Chapman told LAist that four to six LAHSA staff have just three weeks to reconcile the data.

Much of the data processing for the 2023 count was automated, using a computer program with a specific set of instructions, according to documents LAHSA provided to LAist after a public records request.

LAHSA didn’t use a similar system in 2024 because the staff member who wrote the program was on leave, according to Bryan Brown, who is associate director of data management at LAHSA and helped lead data processing.

Brown said the remaining staff was “recreating the process to the extent the rest of the team knew” what that program had done.

LAist requested LAHSA’s policies regarding how the 2024 data was processed.

Brown said that while there was no written policy, the process was “understood by the small team that works on this year over year.”

LAHSA invited LAist reporters to their downtown L.A. office to walk through how they collected and cleaned the data of duplicates and errors.

The process was “adjusted” as the LAHSA team worked through the data, Brown said, influenced by unique circumstances in each assigned area.

“It was a nimble process,” Brown said, where they established guidelines that then had to be modified.

The number of observations volunteers submitted on the app could be higher or lower than what LAHSA verified after considering all the data, he told LAist. “It truly varies tract to tract," he said, "situation to situation, times 3,000.”

The agency shared the document below that they created in 2025 in response to LAist questions about how their process in 2024 worked.

LAHSA provided LAist with a flow chart that was made after the count to describe how they processed their data.

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Louis Abramson, an adjunct senior physical scientist at RAND who researches homelessness in L.A., told LAist that transparency, simplicity and consistency from year to year are key when counting such a large number of people. He said he is concerned that changes to how LAHSA conducted the count opened the door to more error.

Apart from his work with RAND, Abramson was a founding board member of the homelessness-focused nonprofit Hollywood 4WRD and volunteered in the LAHSA count in 2024.

Abramson said that the area in Hollywood where he volunteered was recounted by a professional team from LAHSA after Hollywood 4WRD wrote a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors saying that issues with the app compromised their ability to “ensure volunteer safety, data integrity, and to recover physical materials.”

“I think the most damaging thing of 2024 was that confidence was eroded,” Abramson told LAist. “The mechanism that [LAHSA] used to deliver this number became complex enough such that there were lots of ways it could go wrong, and it did go wrong in some of those ways.”

Questions from the community

Two weeks after the count was conducted in January 2024, Jonah Glickman from L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s office reached out to LAHSA with questions, according to emails LAist acquired through a public records request to LAHSA.

Horvath’s district includes the L.A. County’s coast from Venice, where homelessness has been the subject of tension, up to the Ventura County line. Glickman asked about beaches that community members believed had gone uncounted in 2024, and whether LAHSA could provide “a detailed breakdown of the data confirmation process that could be shared with the community.”

Through public records requests, LAist uncovered an internal email conversation between Brown and Sally Malone, LAHSA’s director of government affairs, about Glickman’s question.

“We don’t have a robust ‘official’ documented process,” Brown wrote to Malone. “In part because the back-end and how the system actually operated during the count has changed so significantly year-over-year.” Brown did share partial documentation of the process with Malone, but the agency did not share that information with Horvath’s office.

LAHSA eventually confirmed in an email to Horvath’s office that “Homeless Count volunteers may not have consistently counted some sandy beach areas.”

A spokesperson for Horvath told LAist that LAHSA never responded to the second question from Glickman about their data validation process.

Questions about the accuracy of the count — again an estimate at a point in time — are far from new.

"My staff and I have led the homeless count in my district for years, and it is hard to remember a time where we felt that we could trust the data 100%,” Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said in an emailed statement. Blumenfield said he has raised concerns about the count accuracy to LAHSA before, but the agency’s responses “lacked the urgency I was hoping for.”

A 2017 Economic Roundtable report found L.A.’s homeless count lacked reliable year-to-year comparability, because of inconsistent methods and data collection across different counts.

Pete White, executive director of L.A. CAN, a nonprofit that does housing advocacy work in Skid Row, said the drop in homelessness observed in the 2024 count didn’t match what he was seeing in the streets.

“We have always known that the homeless count methodology was flawed and resulted in undercounts, year in and year out,” White said. “The naked eye could see the inconsistency of reported decreases and increased visible homelessness.”

Nearly half of LAist readers surveyed last summer reported seeing homelessness increasing in their neighborhoods in 2023 and the first half of 2024, while 28% reported decreases.

Are homeless initiatives working?

Some homelessness experts say they do take L.A.'s 2024 homeless count reduction as a sign that the city’s programs such as Inside Safe, which provides city-funded hotel rooms to bring people off the streets, are showing progress.

Mayor Karen Bass discusses the 2025 homeless count.

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“What we're seeing in other parts of the country, a focus on punitive measures and criminalization, that doesn't work,” said Alex Visotsky, Senior California Policy Fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness based in Washington, D.C. “Focusing on getting folks back into housing seems to be bending the curve.”

Others say increased enforcement of anti-camping policies across L.A. County may just be depressing the count.

“Code enforcement, criminalization and sweeps have driven the unhoused deeper into the shadows, and reporting is even more challenging,” said Peter Connery, vice president of Applied Survey Research, a nonprofit research organization that has been contracted to conduct dozens of homeless counts for municipalities in the Western U.S., including L.A.’s first-ever homeless count in 2005.

The homeless count should be considered a “minimum count,” Connery said, because it only reflects what volunteers can see from the street.

Over the past year, LAHSA has been criticized for failing to properly track billions of dollars it spends on services. L.A. County supervisors pulled funding from the agency and a federal judge is currently considering handing control of L.A. city homelessness spending to a court-appointed receiver. The Los Angeles City Council also recently voted to address inconsistent and fragmented data collection in the city’s homeless services system and look for pathways to separate from LAHSA.

Adams Kellum told LAHSA commissioners last month that the L.A. city budget and loss of funding from the county could jeopardize next year’s count.

With this backdrop, LAHSA officials released data from the February 2025 count in March, months earlier than usual. The agency said the data was preliminary and could change, but it once again showed a major drop in unsheltered homelessness that city officials say show their programs are working, despite the mounting criticism of LAHSA from public officials.

In a LAHSA Commission meeting on April 25, Paul Rubenstein, a LAHSA spokesperson, said the reason they released the preliminary estimates was because the agency “felt like this was very important information for stakeholders to have as they were considering significant shifts to the system.”

White, of L.A. CAN, remains skeptical.

LAHSA “released premature data to support City Hall’s narrative of plummeting numbers,” White told LAist. “It has been weaponized for its own political purpose.”

L.A. has been in federal court over allegations the city has not complied with terms of a settlement agreement that laid out milestones to reduce homelessness.

“My view is that they’re in a political battle for their lives right now,” Federal Judge David O. Carter said during a court hearing about the settlement in March. Carter, the judge considering pulling control of homeless spending from the city, said LAHSA’s release of preliminary data could be “political gamesmanship.”

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday agreed to pay $4.9 million to settle four lawsuits by people who were injured in collisions with Sheriff’s Department patrol cars.

The payouts come amid increased scrutiny of crashes by law enforcement officers. It has emerged as a major national issue, with cities across the country paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts because of vehicle collisions involving officers, deputies or agents.

In the latest L.A. County payouts, tied to collisions that happened between 2018 and 2020, all plaintiffs said deputies were negligent when they crashed into their cars.

County supervisors settled the lawsuits during an open-session vote Tuesday. The county admitted no wrongdoing.

A collision in Paramount

Freddy Ontiveros and Antonio De La Cruz Zamora were hit from behind in 2018 in the city of Paramount, according to their lawsuit filed in Superior Court. They alleged in the suit that a sheriff’s deputy “rear ended the vehicle which was stopped behind plaintiff's vehicle, pushing the vehicle into plaintiff's vehicle causing plaintiff personal injuries and property damage.”

The deputy was responding to a call of a robbery in progress and had activated the lights and sirens on the vehicle.

A review of the Crash Data Retrieval system found the deputy was traveling south on Paramount Boulevard at 75 mph and slowed to 35 mph at the time of the collision, according to a corrective action plan presented to the board Tuesday.

“The collision investigation concluded that the deputy sheriff caused the collision as he was driving at an unsafe speed for traffic conditions,” the plan stated.

The case settled for $1.75 million.

Later, the Lakewood Sheriff’s Station — which covers Paramount — conducted a review of all traffic collisions for the calendar year 2020 through the end of 2024. The audit revealed there were 196 total collisions for this five-year period, 129 of which were classified as preventable and 67 classified as non-preventable.

“To improve employee safety and reduce the Department's liability and exposure, Lakewood supervisors continue to conduct bi-weekly briefings which focus on the importance of safe driving as well as abiding by all the rules of the road when operating county vehicles,” the plan stated.

Other collisions

In a separate incident, Shannon Story had a green light at Palmdale intersection on Oct. 27, 2019. According to her complaint, a deputy ran a red light and crashed into Story’s vehicle as she entered the intersection. The impact of the collision caused Story’s vehicle to crash into the corner wall of a 7-Eleven convenience store.

“Plaintiff sustained significant injuries as a result of the collision,” her complaint read. She settled the case for $1.2 million.

In another case filed by Jose Gaitan, he says a sheriff’s deputy in a department vehicle rear-ended his car. LAist was not immediately able to get further details on the crash. He settled for $450,000.

The summary corrective action plan for a fourth collision describes how a deputy was backing up to make contact with a suspect when he ran into a car driven by Alejandra Gonzalez. The deputy “reversed approximately two to three feet and collided into the Plaintiff’s vehicle at approximately 5-10 mph.”

Gonzalez settled for $1.5 million.

With only 100 days to go before the FIFA World Cup, what should have been a period of celebration is turning instead into one of turmoil.

The U.S. and Israel attacks on Iran have raised major questions about whether the Persian country will withdraw from the 48-squad tournament — a step no other country has taken after qualifying since 1950 when Scotland, as well as others such as India and Turkey, decided not to participate in part tied to travel costs to the games in Brazil.

But Iran's participation is not the only uncertainty. Violence in Mexico following the killing of a cartel boss sparked questions about the country's ability to attract fans, while concerns about funding for U.S. host cities have also flared up in recent weeks.

And then there is the outrage over the ticket prices, and controversy surrounding President Donald Trump and his administration's policies, including military actions and immigration enforcement.

Angst in the runup to World Cup tournaments is nothing new. Concerns about violence preceded the 2010 and 2014 World Cup tournaments in South Africa and Brazil, while the selection of Russia and Qatar as hosts for the last previous two tournaments also sparked controversies of their own.

But no World Cup men's tournament has been this big before, with 48 teams set to play 104 matches across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. And no recent World Cup has been staged amidst so much global geopolitical uncertainty.

Here are the top areas of concern ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

Will Iran withdraw?

It was the top question surrounding the FIFA World Cup as the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran this weekend. So far there's no indication that Iran plans to withdraw, whether to boycott it or for other reasons.

Iran is one of the stronger squads in Asia and is set to play its seventh World Cup this year.

Iran Football Federation President Mehdi Taj acknowledged the uncertainty on Iranian TV, according to Reuters and other media.

"What we can say now is that due to this attack and its viciousness, it is far from our expectations that we can look at the World Cup with hope," Taj said according to the wire agency.

Iran is set to play two games against New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, home to a large Iranian diaspora community. The country will also play Egypt in Seattle.

FIFA has not directly weighed in. Its general secretary, Mattias Grafstrom, said on Sunday the organization would continue to "monitor the developments around all issues around the world."

"We had the final draw in Washington, where all teams participated. Our focus is to have a safe Word Cup with everyone participating," Grafstrom said.

Whether Iran participates at the World Cup may be in doubt, but at least one thing is certain: its fans will find it difficult to travel to the U.S. given that Iran is one of a handful of countries that faces a travel ban, though it doesn't affect the team and its coaches.

Iran's players pose for a team picture ahead of a FIFA World Cup 2026 qualifying game against North Korea at the Azadi Sports Complex in Tehran on June 10, 2025.

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Atta Kenare

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Will Mexico be safe for visitors?

The flare-up of violence by armed groups across the country after Mexico killed cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes last month has sparked concerns about safety and security at one of the co-hosts of the tournament.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asserted there will be no risks when the country stages the World Cup, while FIFA President Gianni Infantino has expressed his "total confidence" in Mexico.

Mexico is set to host 13 games for the World Cup, including four in Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco where Oseguera Cervante's group is primarily based and where much of the violence took place.

Concerns about violence are not new. Questions about safety also were raised ahead of the South Africa 2010 World Cup as well as Brazil in 2014 — and both countries ended up successfully hosting their respective tournaments.

Will American host cities get funding?

Concerns about finances are a perennial concern ahead of major sports events — and the U.S. is proving no different.

The 11 American host cities still have not received $625 million in federal funding for security costs that are critical to staging the tournament, including in Foxborough, Mass. The funding was supposed to be provided by the Department of Homeland Security through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

A FEMA spokesperson directed NPR to a recent posting on X from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem noting that "FEMA was in the final stages of reviewing applications to ensure proper oversight" but that the partial shutdown affecting the agency — for which she blamed Democrats — had put "significant portions of the FEMA staff on administrative leave."

For some host cities, the matter is becoming urgent. The White House FIFA World Cup Task Force has not yet responded to NPR's queries.

"Without receiving this money, it could be catastrophic for our planning and coordination," Ray Martinez, the chief operating officer for the Miami Host Committee, told a congressional hearing according to Politico.

Will fans be priced out of the tournament?

Perhaps no issue more directly affects fans than the staggering high costs they are facing to attend the World Cup.

FIFA has set the highest ticket prices ever for a World Cup, making tickets to the tournament unaffordable for many fans. Its use of dynamic pricing has also sparked controversy; the most expensive tickets to the final in New Jersey initially sold at over $6,300 only to jump to nearly $8,700 in later sales.

The MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., is set to host eight games in the 2026 World Cup, including the final set for July 19, 2026.

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Not only are ticket prices high — the cost of travel and lodging has surged. Yet despite all the challenges, FIFA claimed it had received over 500 million ticket requests in its last sales window.

That said, FIFA has provided little additional information to back up its claims, making it difficult to determine whether the demand is concentrated just in high profile games such as Colombia against Portugal in Miami or mainly focused in high-profile teams such as Argentina.

Will President Trump and his policies deter fans?

Perhaps the biggest unknown is the effect that Trump and his administration's policies will have on attending the World Cup.

The administration's travel restrictions not only affects Iranian fans, they also hit fans of three other countries that have already qualified for the tournament: Senegal, Ivory Coast and Haiti.

President Trump and his policies remain controversial both at home and abroad. Earlier this year, when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, some European officials raised the prospect of a boycott though the moves never prospered. Even former FIFA President Sepp Blatter encouraged fans to "stay away" from the U.S.

And the latest U.S. and Israel attacks against Iran — which follow the U.S. capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro — have brought renewed attention to FIFA's controversial awarding of its peace prize at the tournament's draw ceremony in Washington, D.C., in December.

The U.S. has already seen a sharp decrease in visitors for a number of reasons, including increased scrutiny at the border (such as a requirement to potentially share social media posts), as well as unease about violence because of high-profile killings involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Oxford Economics projects a rise in visitors tied to the World Cup, so the number of visitors could at least partially recover this year, though other research points to a reduced number of visitors from Europe to the U.S. this year.

It's yet another sign of uncertainty in what is set to be the biggest-ever tournament with only 100 days to go.
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Below 40-degree temperatures didn’t stop a running crew of women from gathering before sunrise in Lincoln Heights on one of L.A.’s coldest mornings this year. 

Bundled up in beanies and gloves, they warmed up by stretching their arms and legs before setting off into residential streets. They logged three miles in just over 30 minutes.

But this isn’t your regular run club.

As they run through El Sereno, Cypress Park, Highland Park and Lincoln Heights, they scan intersections for suspicious or unmarked vehicles. They slow down near bus stops with early risers on their way to work. They greet street vendors selling tamales.

They’re the N.E.L.A Patrol Runners, and they’re looking for immigration agents.

The group formed in February, amid heightened anxiety in Northeast L.A., where federal agents have taken day laborers at the Cypress Park Home Depot and detained a food vendor in Highland Park as recently as last month. In neighborhoods with high immigrant populations, founder Claudia Yanez said she saw a need for neighbors to look out for each other in real time. 

The idea came to 30-year-old Yanez while on a recent run in her El Sereno neighborhood, when she found herself “unconsciously patrolling.”

“If you live in areas targeted [by ICE], you’re already looking out,” Yanez said.

While groups across Los Angeles, including Unión del Barrio, the Harbor Area Peace Patrols in Terminal Island, and the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network, conduct rapid response efforts, Yanez said their patrol runs are rooted specifically in Northeast L.A.. 

Their mission, she said, is “to defend from ICE terrorism.”

The N.E.L.A Patrol Runners stretch on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, before beginning their run toward the Home Depot in Cypress Park.

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They start at 6 a.m. and typically run two to three miles at an 11- to 12-minute mile pace, allowing them to stop, investigate and document any vehicles that could be linked to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If they spot anything suspicious, they would quickly call Unión del Barrio.

The goal is not to physically interfere, but to document and alert neighbors of ICE activity nearby. 

“As a runner, you kind of already have eyes out,” said Yanez, who recently attended a patrol training with the Community Self-Defense Coalition.

“You’re not in a car, so you’re able to see things a little more clearly, closely and slower.”

As Yanez recruits for more runners, a pinned post on the group’s Instagram reads: “Do you like running and hate ICE? Join N.E.L.A. Patrol Runners.”

So far, the group is made up of a small but consistent set of runners — all women.

“I need men to show up,” Yanez said. 

With a handful of runners, “we’re also vulnerable,” she said. “When it’s a big group of people, especially if we’re actively patrolling, we need numbers so it could feel safer.”

To Yanez, this work is a shared responsibility. “I feel like we all have a part to play right now,” she said.

The NELA Patrol Runners jog on Daly Street in Lincoln Heights.

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Ultimately, Yanez hopes their efforts do more than monitor immigration agents. She hopes to also build community and reassurance. “The more we do it, the more we get to know our neighbors,” she said. She wants vendors and others to find comfort knowing: “They’re looking out for us.”

The N.E.L.A Patrol Runners drew inspiration from the Huntington Park Run Club, a group that began tracking and verifying ICE activity after agents in early June raided the Home Depot on Slauson Avenue and State Street. 

“We’ve always responded to the needs of the community,” said Iris Delgado, 34, founder of the Huntington Park Run Club. “That’s what people have known about us.”

Since its founding in 2024, the run club has advocated for pedestrian safety after a relative of a run club member was hit by a vehicle; they’ve also discussed the role of men in keeping each other safe after one of their runners was sexually harassed at a local park. 

“When the raids happened in June, it was like, ‘OK, this is another safety component,” Delgado said.

The run club morphed into providing community self-defense tactics. 

Members of the run club trained with the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network to learn how to monitor ICE activity as people began sending footage of reported immigration raids to their Instagram account. They raised and distributed money for local day laborers and street vendors, and helped establish a community defense center at the nearby Home Depot.

Their efforts inspired the creation of the Southeast Los Angeles Rapid Response Network.

For Delgado, running in your neighborhood is a source of pride and joy. “No matter what’s happening, we’re still outside,” she said.

“The role of a person who runs, who’s able-bodied, is to be aware of why other people in your community don’t feel safe running … and try to make it a little bit safer for them,” Delgado said. 

“When the N.E.L.A. Patrol runners first started, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah,’” Delgado said. “When people take it as their responsibility to look out for each other, that’s what makes the community safer.”

A N.E.L.A. Patrol Runners sign can be seen on the window of a coffee shop in Highland Park.

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Alejandra Molina

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Boyle Heights Beat

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In Cypress Park, the N.E.L.A. Patrol runners last Friday jogged toward the Home Depot on Figueroa, where last fall a toddler was among six people taken in an immigration raid.

“Buenos dias, chicas,” a tamalera said, greeting them.

“Bien despiertas,” a passerby said. 

The runners reached the Home Depot parking lot, slowed down and walked closely toward parked trucks to ensure the vehicles were not the kind typically used by ICE. 

They determined the scene was clear and ran back to complete their patrol. Another quiet morning – for now.

ICE has released Cambodian Genocide survivor Sithy Yi from immigration detention following an order by a federal judge.

Yi, who fled the genocide and came to the U.S. with her family in 1981, was detained by ICE at a routine immigration check-in in Santa Ana on Jan. 8 and held at the Adelanto Detention Facility for almost two months.

In response to a lawsuit arguing that she was being held unconstitutionally, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela issued an order Friday requiring ICE to “immediately release” Yi. The order also prevents the agency from deporting Yi without providing an opportunity to be heard by a neutral arbiter and bans ICE from transferring her outside the court’s jurisdiction.

The ruling says the government did not oppose Yi’s request for the court to order her released. Her attorney had alleged ICE failed to follow procedural requirements such as showing she violated any conditions of her release or proving that she would likely be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Reunited with her family

Yi was released Monday and has returned to her family, according to her attorney. Yi’s family includes her mother and two sisters she helped to survive starvation and mass killings at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia before they came to the U.S. as refugees.

Retaliation allegations against detention center staff

Yi’s attorney says that in addition to the court’s findings, she believes her client’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment was violated while detained at Adelanto.

“ She was retaliated against by security and medical personnel because she had been communicating with her family, and through her family with me. And we've been reporting about these conditions to Sen. [Adam] Schiff, as well as other members of Congress. And somehow word got back and she was retaliated against,” her attorney Kim Luu-Ng told LAist’s AirTalk on Tuesday.

“She was verbally abused, but she was also punished. She was not allowed to use the bathroom. She was not allowed to shower,” Luu-Ng continued.

“It is absolutely freezing in the detention center, but they don't care. She said to me that she has to wrap herself in blankets, but they're still freezing.”

Yi and other detainees were regularly getting sick from spoiled food served at the facility.

“These are civil detainees. These are not criminal detainees. And there are laws in this country that are supposed to protect against this type of punitive and cruel treatment of detainees,” Luu-Ng added.

She said that in many ways, she feels “criminal detainees have even more rights than civil detainees. And so this is a real crisis.”

Why Yi was released

Luu-Ng has represented Yi since her immigration case began in 2013. Yi was first brought to immigration court after a drug conviction her family says stemmed from untreated mental health issues from being tortured as a child and prolonged exposure to abuse into adulthood.

Her immigration case ended in 2016, with a judge ruling to withhold an order of removal due to concerns she would be tortured if she were deported to Cambodia.

Yi also applied for a U visa — a type of visa providing temporary immigration status to crime victims who have cooperated with law enforcement — in 2022. That visa application is still pending.

Judge Valenzuela explained her reasoning for the order, writing in the document that ICE did not oppose a motion by Yi’s lawyer requesting she be released. Luu-Ng claimed in the motion that ICE detained her client without following required steps, such as showing she violated any conditions of her release or proving that she would likely be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Valenzuela also pointed to another case against ICE where she granted an order for Ramy Hakim to be released based on similar circumstances Jan. 22. Hakim was detained at a regular immigration check-in Dec. 19 despite receiving protections in 2004 against being deported to Egypt where he would likely be tortured. He was held at the same Adelanto facility as Yi.

“The facts are a Biden-appointed activist judge ordered this criminal illegal alien released into American communities," a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in an emailed statement. The spokesperson said Yi was ordered to be removed from the country in 2016 had “received full due process.”

Yi’s attorney says ICE kept her detained through the weekend despite the judge ordering her to be released immediately.

 ”ICE doesn't work on the weekends,” Luu-Ng said. “Any minute that my client was detained beyond the time that the order was issued was an unconstitutional detention.”

ICE spokespeople have not responded to a request for comment about this allegation.