The Brief

The latest homeless count from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that 25% of unhoused people in L.A. County self-reported experiencing a severe mental illness (SMI). That’s up from 24% from last year's count.

The latest count, which was conducted over a three-day period in January, found that there are more than 75,000 unhoused people in L.A. County.

The data on mental illness was collected during a demographic survey in which participants are asked whether they have or have been diagnosed with a severe mental illness.

The latest reporting on the unhoused community is a reminder of the thousands of people living on the streets in L.A. who deal with debilitating mental illness.

Deborah Smith's son, Nick, was unhoused and unsheltered between November 2022 and February of this year. He’d been diagnosed since his early 20s with bipolar disorder and later schizophrenia.

Smith said she remembers fighting for months to get her son into shelter and care during the worst of the storms that pummeled L.A.

“The entire thing was a nightmare,” Smith said. “I couldn’t sleep at night when I would hear the rain. I knew that due to his mental illness, that he was not making good choices for himself.”

Smith said Nick was not drinking water due to his psychosis and was subsisting on a diet of Slim Jims and Red Bull. She said Nick was finally assessed by a field psychiatrist with L.A. County’s Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement (HOME) program and only then did he start receiving some of the services he needed.

For her part, Smith doesn’t believe Nick would have self-reported that he lives with a severe mental illness, due to stigma around SMI and a common symptom of mental illness called anosognosia, or lack of insight.

Brittney Weissman is executive director of Hollywood 4WRD, where she does outreach for a new pilot project that aims to help people living with a serious mental illness get care within their own community in Hollywood.

“That number seems low,” Weissman told LAist, referring to the 25% SMI figure represented in LAHSA’s latest report. “I think a lot more people in the street live with serious mental illness.”

Weissman, who also previously served as CEO of NAMI Greater Los Angeles County, said clarity gets lost when people are asked to self-report living with SMI.

Randall Kuhn, professor at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA and a lead demographer on the LAHSA count said one of the goals in the coming months is to use some of the demographic survey data to compare the level of mental illness with duration of homelessness.

One thing is clear from multiple studies, Kuhn said: “The longer you’re homeless, the worse your physical, mental and substance use status is.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A fire at the Lineage cold storage facility in Boyle Heights was knocked down​ Wednesday evening, a week after solar panels on its roof ignited and blanketed the region in harmful smoke.

The Los Angeles Fire Department announced the fire was extinguished at 5:58 p.m., and said there were no active flames and no threat of fire spread.

“While the fire has been knocked down, debris within the structure continues to smolder as crews transition into the overhaul phase of operations,” LAFD posted on Instagram.

“The chief’s goal was to have us put this out today,” Milo Cope, a public information officer with the Los Angeles Fire Department, told Boyle Heights Beat on Wednesday morning.

“They’ll manage tearing this building apart and we can stand by for any small smoldering fires that need to be addressed,” Cope said. 

Firefighters will now begin handing over operations to the owners of the building. 

The fire at the cold storage facility began burning last Wednesday on a solar panel farm on the warehouse’s roof that later burned through the rubber insulation around the building. It reignited on Friday, with the city of Los Angeles and the governor’s office declaring an emergency the following day. 

Since the fire broke out, residents living closest to the facility have endured smoky conditions that they say have disrupted daily life, affected their health and limited their ability to work as firefighters continued battling the blaze.

Mayor Karen Bass on Sunday said a mandatory evacuation “is not necessary;” state guidelines tie evacuation orders to immediate threats to life or property. For those who wish to voluntarily leave, “we have the facilities for you,” she said, pointing to the smoke relief shelter available. 

She and LAFD Fire Chief Jaime Moore have repeatedly advised residents sensitive to smoke or who have respiratory concerns to stay indoors, close their windows, wear masks when they do need to go outside and head to established shelters if they need more relief.

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado on Monday called for the public release of air quality and environmental testing results in English and Spanish and for a full report detailing the materials that burned at the facility. Boyle Heights residents, Jurado said, “deserve the very basic right to know what is in the air.” 

On Tuesday, Supervisor Hilda Solis urged agencies to be diligent in the cleanup process. “Some of our communities have become particularly alarmed about being the dumping ground for hazardous or toxic material…,” Solis said.

Poor air quality on Sunday led several schools hosting summer programs to announce they would move classes elsewhere on Monday as a precaution. The school relocation will last until Friday, said officials from LAUSD’s Region East.

Students from Dena Elementary and Dacotah Early Education Center were relocated to Sunrise Elementary, Eastman Early Education Center students moved to Humphreys Elementary, and Stevenson Middle School students were moved to Belvedere Middle School, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed the Trump administration a tool that could make it far more difficult for asylum seekers to enter the United States.

Asylum is a form of legal protection available to people fleeing persecution in their home countries if they meet certain criteria. Under U.S. law, an asylum seeker who "arrives in" the U.S. is entitled to apply for asylum and generally cannot be removed from the country until their asylum application is processed. 

By a 6-3 vote, the high court ruled that federal law allows the government to stop asylum seekers from physically setting foot in the country, effectively keeping them from applying for asylum. 

The Obama administration was the first to try stemming the flow of asylum seekers that way. But the lower courts blocked the policy on grounds that it violated federal law by denying asylum to people who otherwise would have qualified for it, had they been permitted to literally put one foot over the border.

The Trump administration, however, sought to revive the policy, contending that the lower court's ruling "deprives the Executive Branch of a critical tool for addressing border surges and preventing overcrowding at ports of entry." And on Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito ruled that because asylum seekers are not in the U.S. when they are turned away at the border, they did not "arrive in" the country. Therefore, he continued, the legal protections for asylum seekers have not kicked in.

Writing for the liberal dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Border Patrol agents speak with all immigrants at legal entry points and speaking with an agent is effectively the first step in "arriving in" the U.S.

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The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to begin mass deportations of people who have been living and working legally in the United States for years, some even decades. By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court's conservative majority ruled that the President has virtually unrestrained power to end the Temporary Protected Status program, known as TPS.

Congress enacted the TPS law in 1990 to allow fully vetted and eligible migrants to live and work legally in the U.S. if they cannot return safely to their home countries because of natural disasters, armed conflicts, and other extraordinary conditions. The Department of Homeland Security designates which foreign countries qualify for TPS.

Since the law's enactment, every President, Republican and Democrat, has embraced it, except Trump. He, in contrast, is trying to end the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. And on Thursday, the high court gave him the tools to do it.

Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito that under the TPS law, the president has unreviewable authority to end the program, without intervention from the courts.

There are more than a dozen countries that have been designated with TPS, including the two in this case— Haiti, with 330,000 displaced persons living legally in the U.S., and Syria with roughly 3,800. The U.S. State Department currently warns Americans in the strongest terms not to go to these countries to these countries or because of the dangers of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care. The court's decision means that the President can end the protected status of Haitians and Syrians without the possibility of judicial review. Migrants living legally in the U.S. from those countries will likely revert to illegal status, meaning they will lose their jobs and face deportation, with many of them forced to leave their American-born children behind.

The Trump administration had attempted to strip TPS from 13 of the 17 countries that had it before the second term began. As for the remaining four countries that still have TPS—El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine, they may well lose their TPS when they come up for renewal this fall.

Dissenting from today's decision were the court's three liberal justices.

Reaction to the decision was fast and furious among immigrant rights groups. "Revoking TPS protection is not just cruel; it is economic self-sabotage that will rip billions out of the U.S. economy and destabilize communities nationwide," said Todd SchulteFWD.us, a bipartisan group that advocates for immigration reform, said in a statement.

According to the group, 200,000 Haitian TPS holders are in the U.S. workforce, including 15,000 agricultural workers, 13,000 nursing assistants, and 8,000 caregivers. What's more, the group says, TPS holders generate an estimated $5.9 billion for the U.S. economy each year and annually pay a total of $1.5 billion in federal and state taxes.

Copyright 2026 NPR