The Brief

Los Angeles County residents living in unstable housing conditions were almost twice as likely as their securely housed counterparts to open their doors to friends and family members who were displaced during January’s wildfires.

That’s according to results released Thursday from the LABarometer survey, a project of the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research.

During February and March, the researchers put a series of fire-related questions to a panel of 1,360 county households. The respondents represented a diverse cross-section of L.A. County in terms of race, income, geography and housing stability, researchers said.

Among the respondents who said they personally knew someone who lost a home in the fires, those identified as “unstably housed” were more likely to say they let an evacuee stay with them (16%) than those who had stable housing (9%).

Kyla Thomas, a USC sociologist and director of LABarometer, called that finding ”striking.”

“If you think about people who are in housing-insecure situations, those households are more likely to be overcrowded already,” Thomas said. “What you're seeing is the most vulnerable residents taking on additional housing burdens to support those more severely impacted.”

Some evacuees are still living in unstable homes

The researchers found that across the survey’s questions, responses from people who said they were stably housed often differed significantly from the responses of unstably housed people, defined as those who said they worried about losing their housing “often” or “very often.”

Some of those doubled-up living arrangements were only temporary, according to the survey. But it found that unstably housed respondents were more likely to still be housing evacuees (6%) months after the fires were put out compared with stably housed respondents (2%).

The survey also found unstably housed respondents were more likely to say they lost income or savings because of the fires (14%) than stably housed respondents (5%).

Thomas said the responses point toward increased struggles for people who were already more likely to have missed past rent payments and be spending a high percentage of their income on housing.

Will post-fire eviction protections keep people housed? 

State and local eviction protections were put in place for renters affected by the fires.

Shortly after the fires broke out, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order providing temporary safeguards against eviction to tenants who took in roommates not authorized under a lease, if those new occupants were displaced by the fires.

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors also gave tenants a legal defense against eviction if they can’t pay rent on time because of financial impacts of the wildfires. Landlords could still file an eviction, but the county protection would allow tenants who notified their landlords about post-fire hardships to fight it in court.

Thomas said it will take time to know whether those protections have succeeded at stabilizing Angelenos in an already expensive housing market turbocharged by the fires.

LABarometer has been running since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent similar shockwaves through L.A.’s rental housing market.

“We saw during COVID that those eviction protections made a big difference, but then once they were lifted, we started to see an uptick in evictions,” Thomas said.

She added that future LABarometer surveys will continue to examine the effects of the fires.

“People are maybe protected now,” Thomas said. “But when those protections go away, is that when they finally experience the full impact the wildfires have had on them?”

In a cozy dance studio in Garden Grove, dancers of all experience levels, ages and backgrounds flock to Queer Latin Dance OC to learn the steps to salsa, cumbia and bachata.

For many, the dance class is more than educational — it’s a place to get away from it all, to find community and to uplift one another through art.

When Rodrigo Marquez founded Queer Latin Dance OC at the beginning of this year, he said he was filling a gap in Orange County that often lacks safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community.

“I wanted to make creative communities for us to learn in a safe environment,” Marquez said. “Everyone's here to learn, and I want the pressure of whatever's going on in the world, just to forget for the next hour.”

Queer Latin Dance OC meets three times a week to learn the steps to salsa, cumbia and bachata.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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What are the dance lessons like? 

When creating his teaching plan, Marquez said he considers the range of experience his students might have. Everybody starts somewhere, he added, and the hardest part is showing up.

“It is scary, but if you're already showing up, then just jump in and just forget about the world. It's a great distraction, and dancing makes you feel better,” Marquez said.

Philip Lee, an elementary school teacher from Tustin, took his first class with the group Monday night, trying the quick steps of salsa.

“I had a stressful day. … All my stress that I had in my neck and upper back just kind of went away,” Lee said, adding that the high energy in the room is infectious. “It was nice just laughing with people in the community and meeting new people.”

Lee said the dance lesson gave him a space to be with community.

“The queer community specifically, and just kind of let my guard down and just be free and laugh and enjoy being me and celebrated for a love for the arts,” Lee said. “That's not a space that is always safe.”

Before taking lessons at Queer Latin Dance OC, Melba Rivera said she came in with zero dance experience.

“You come as you are. No matter what level you're at or how you identify or what your experience is, everybody's here and everybody's learning,” Rivera said. “It's a very encouraging and motivating space.”

Salsa and bachata are social dances, Marquez said, but one thing that makes his class unique to many is that regardless of gender identity, anyone can follow or lead.

Typically, the lead falls to the male dancer, and women follow. Marquez said it was important that no one feels pressured to be one or the other.

“That's why I created this, so people like me can just come and learn, not be expected to be in a gender role based on how they look,” Marquez said. “They want to dance how they feel.”

Why it matters

Taryn Heiner said, especially in Orange County, it’s challenging to find spaces that are queer-friendly and queer-open.

“That's really what makes this space so kind and warm and welcoming,” Heiner said. “We have all that base understanding of respecting one another, no matter who they are, who they love and what they do.”

Growing up in Orange County, not every room you walk into is a safe space, Rivera added.

“So walking into a room like this, where everybody's friendly, everybody's learning, everybody's just here for the same purpose to get better, to support each other, is really important,” Rivera said. “Not just in the class, but [in] the friendships we make outside of the classroom.”

Outside of dance class, Marquez’s students meet up for monthly hikes and other get-togethers. Marquez said it is a privilege and an honor to bring people together through his love for dance.

“I've seen people become friends since January, and I see them practice outside of practice,” Marquez said. “I've always had a dream to do my own dance classes, but to do it in a way where people can connect and just be themselves. It's far greater than that.”

Queer Latin Dance OC offers lessons to dancers of all experience levels and has created a new community hub in Orange County.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Want to dance? 

Salsa, cumbia and bachata classes are held three nights a week on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Classes are $20 per session, but Marquez also offers a free beginner salsa class every Monday.

You can register for the class of your choice here. Payments are taken in person.

Border Patrol agents have been roving from city to city over the last 15 months, far from their home bases in California and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, engaged in an unprecedented mass deportation campaign.

A collaboration between CalMatters, Evident Media and Bellingcat has tracked these agents, documenting their tactics on the ground and through mountains of video footage, since their first proof-of-concept raid in Bakersfield in January 2025.

Exactly one year later, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, followed weeks later by the killing of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent.

Our investigation shows that beyond those two shootings, immigration agents engaged in a pattern of force and questionable detention, aggressive tactics that courts have said likely violated the Constitution, as they moved from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, and then Chicago and Minneapolis.

In each city, federal courts stepped in to restrain them from violating civil liberties in that jurisdiction. Agents later deployed to another city. The video evidence suggests agents’ tactics became more brazen with each stop.

Under President Donald Trump, immigration agents have operated without typical public accountability. Many agents wear masks. Incident reports are largely hidden from the public.

“We are in a completely uncharted world now with these masked agents,” said John Roth, who served as inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security under Presidents Barack Obama and Trump.

“The first thing that you do when you give an agent a gun and a badge and the authority over American people is to make sure that they follow the Constitution, period,” he said.

In this new film, we focus on the activity of five agents from the US-Mexico border whose identities we’ve been able to confirm.

Watch the documentary

We are not aware of any disciplinary action taken against these agents. DHS did not respond to requests for comment; the individual agents either declined to comment or didn’t respond to calls or emails.

We showed the incidents to Roth and Steve Bunnell, former DHS general counsel. Both have testified before Congress, raising the alarm about what they see as a dismantling of the department’s accountability and credibility. Roth called the incidents “difficult to watch.”

“There are sort of two essential components of DHS and law enforcement generally being effective, and that’s trust and credibility,” Bunnell said. “And they have lost those things to the extent they had them.”