The Brief

Pedro Jauregui, with the organization U.S. Vets in Long Beach, Calif., once spent a whole year getting one unhoused veteran to come in from the cold.

"The first time I met him, I had to walk away 'cause he gave me some choice words, waved a one finger at me and said he was gonna kill me," Jauregui said.

But a year of regular visits, including plenty of hot coffee and doughnuts, and Jauregui convinced the vet to come indoors. After that, he sobered up and started using his VA benefits for college.

"We build relationships and then we use whatever we can to get the veteran the help he needs," Jauregui said.

More than 30,000 U.S. military veterans are unhoused, according to the latest government data from an annual one-night "point in time count." That number is down significantly in the past decade, which most experts credit to a straightforward combination of robust funding and a philosophy focused on offering housing without prerequisites, called housing first.

While the Trump administration has promised new housing for vets, President Trump also signed an executive order last year titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets," which leans heavily toward institutionalizing unhoused people against their will. This winter, NPR obtained slides describing a proposed VA plan called "Safe Harbor," which would include veterans in that shift to involuntary treatment. Then, in March, the VA put out a memorandum of understanding with the Justice Department about state court guardianship for veterans.

But VA Secretary Doug Collins says the memorandum has nothing to do with the Safe Harbor proposal.

"We have veterans — not homeless, just veterans — who are in our facilities," he said at the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans annual conference last month. "They have no family, they have no representation, and they really are not in a position to actually make competent choices for their own healthcare."

Collins said the memorandum will help those veterans get important medical decisions made.

"The court will find somebody in the community, not a VA employee, not a VA attorney, [who] will then represent that veteran with the respect to their medical well-being, moving them along, getting them the healthcare that they need," he said.

Collins says the leaked slide deck describing project Safe Harbor was still just a proposal, and he accused the lead Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Mark Takano, of distorting it.

"Somebody in our building leaked it to the Hill. And guess what? Rep. Takano happily put out information that wasn't correct," Collins said. "I've got veterans who are sitting in hospitals who can't make competent choices for themselves to get better … next-level care. We're helping them do that. … When it came out that we were attacking homeless and going after homeless, I wanted to puke," he said.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins in the Oval Office at the White House on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C.

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Takano claimed in a statement to NPR that the VA is withholding information about the program from the public.

"I've given VA multiple opportunities at public hearings and in congressional requests to clarify its intent, and it refuses to do so," Takano said. "Doug Collins repeatedly fails to recognize or plan for the risks associated with guardianship, an industry rife with fraud and exploitation."

Takano said his staff will continue to collect information from whistleblowers about courts putting veterans under guardianship.

A VA spokesman reiterated to NPR that the guardianship memorandum is not connected to the leaked "Safe Harbor" plan, which echoed President Trump's executive order about institutionalizing unhoused people. Several veterans advocacy groups have expressed skepticism.

"I like to think that it's altruistic, like they really wanna help veterans in hospital situations have the decision-making skills that they need. But the fact that it also applies to homeless veterans and those veterans at risk of homelessness, I think, is really a slippery slope," said Jess Finucan, director of policy and advocacy at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says the veterans service community is worried.

"What the administration has said publicly on this proposal is at odds with the documentation on the project and its pilot program. That original documentation was directly linked to the president's executive order, calling for involuntary commitment of people experiencing homelessness. I think it's disingenuous for anybody from the VA to say that this was meant for a completely different population," she said.

What proud vet wants to be a burden?

Back in Long Beach, NPR recently rode along with Pedro Jauregui and Veronica Hood, from the group U.S. Vets, as they did street outreach. They both served in the military, but at this point they've spent nearly as many years serving unhoused vets.

"Rather than make it something traumatic where we're forcing you into it, let outreach workers like us build the relationship," Jauregui said.

Their aim was to track down an 87-year-old Navy veteran named Curtis Ervin who has been sleeping in his truck. Even though he's probably been uhoused for decades, Ervin is reluctant to accept offers of housing, Hood said.

"He might think he'd be a burden on people. So he really just wants to do it on his own," she said.

U.S. Navy veteran Curtis Ervin, 87, was homeless for decades before being moved into housing this year.

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Veronica Hood

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"And what proud man or vet wants to be a burden on anybody?" Jauregui added from the passenger seat.

After driving to a few different places where unhoused vets camp out, Hood spots Ervin's maroon pickup parked near a Jack in the Box. She hands him a warm packed meal and some water through the driver's side window.

Ervin said he joined the Navy in 1956.

"I was a diesel engine mechanic. And on the ship, that means you're everything," Ervin said.

His last ship was the USS Bainbridge, a nuclear-powered destroyer.

 "I was aboard when they brought the nuclear fleet to Vietnam, when they brought the [USS aircraft carrier] Enterprise, my ship escorted her. We went around Africa," he recalls.

Ervin said he's been bouncing between hospitals for years, and he can't remember the last time he had a home. Sleeping in a seat has made his legs swell up.

"Right now I'm in the truck. For the last two, three years, I've been dancing from hospital to hospital. … I finally got out because they tried to keep me," Ervin said.

He doesn't like being ordered around.

"I got enough of that in the Navy," he said, even though he's been out for 60 years.

But Veronica Hood seems to have built a rapport, and Ervin said he'll be here tomorrow to go with her to the hospital, and then get a roof over his head.

" I have never used the VA, but I am scheduled to go to the VA tomorrow," he said, "and I hope they don't keep me there."

Driving back, Hood and Jauregui said they know some unhoused people are a danger to themselves and maybe others, but for the most part, they wouldn't want to see vets forced into treatment.

"As you saw with Ervin, it could be both beneficial or it could be extremely traumatic," said Hood.

"My husband is also a veteran. He just retired, and I would be worried for him, too, if I wasn't around, if someone would show him the same compassion. It's how I would want Pedro to be treated. I'm sure how he would want me to be treated," she said

By phone after the visit, Hood told NPR that Curtis Ervin came in the next day, and he's now in housing for the first time in more years than he can remember.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A criminal justice watchdog is calling into question whether Latinos in the L.A. County Superior Court get a fair shot at bail.

The new report from the nonprofit La Defensa, which advocates for reform in the legal system, analyzes a sample of pretrial decisions from 2025 which had been documented by community court-watching volunteers.

One of the key findings was that defendants who were perceived to be Latino had an average bail amount of $157,700 — more than 15 times higher than white defendants and nearly three times higher than Black defendants.

Studies show that inability to pay bail can affect defendants’ livelihoods and their ability to defend themselves, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“ Most families — no matter what they did, no matter what they sold — cannot actually purchase that person’s freedom to give them the fighting chance to go against the state,” Titilayọ Rasaki, La Defensa’s state policy and legal affairs director.

The L.A. County Superior Court says it’s following the law on bail requirements and that the findings are missing context because observation is limited.

How court-watching works

La Defensa’s Court Watch LA program is a community-led effort to document and hold the courts accountable. They train volunteers to go in and observe cases.

The volunteers take notes on the charges, the judge’s conduct and the person’s criminal history, if it comes up. That then gets analyzed against publicly available case information and state law. Programs like this exist in several other cities around the country.

For the latest report, La Defensa volunteers observed 140 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, chosen at random, between January to November 2025.

Judicial accountability lead Bryanna Siguenza explained how she decided where to send the volunteers.

“ I choose a department, specifically ones that are pretty busy, have high case loads, and are arraignment and pretrial,” she said.

What watchers saw

Racial disparities in pretrial settings have been researched at local, state and national levels, but La Defensa’s findings are based entirely on human observation, Siguenza said.

The volunteers are trained to listen for important details that come up in proceedings, but they may not always get the full story behind the charges, like a defendant’s criminal history.

L.A. County Superior Court spokesperson Rob Oftring said the report needs more context.

“Many of the report’s findings, for example, do not appear to account for charge severity or criminal history, both of which are legally significant factors in any release decision…” he wrote in a statement.

La Defensa did not include in its report what charges had been filed in the cases observed. However, according to the report, comparable charges still had disproportionate bail outcomes that “couldn’t be explained by charge severity alone.”

The severity of charges legally informs bail decisions. The Superior Court is required to have standard bail amounts based on the crime, which judges have discretion to adjust.

State law also requires judges to weigh issues like public safety in bail decisions, as well as the defendant’s ability to post bail. According to the volunteers’ observations, the judges considered the latter in just a quarter of cases when setting bail.

Oftring said the court has taken steps to reduce money bail’s usage as allowed by law.

“Bail at arraignment is set only after both the defense and prosecution have been heard and the judge has weighed the specific facts of the case,” his statement read.

The limits of the findings

Oftring said the court values the role organizations like Court Watch LA play in keeping the justice system accountable, but that the sample size of the researchers used in their report is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Roughly 272,000 criminal cases took place during that time period, according to Oftring.

Representatives from La Defensa said they know the report is only a snapshot of the system, and that human observation has its limits.

That’s why in November, they requested 10 years of de-identified data to analyze whether bail outcomes differ across judges, courthouses and demographic groups. Rasaki said they haven’t received it.

“  We would say release the data … by all means, we want to partner. We want to analyze,” she said.

Oftring told LAist they are working on several projects that “provide data-informed scrutiny of how the court operates.”

Southern Californians are in for yet another scorching weekend.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for much of the region through Monday, with temperatures expected to hit their peak on Sunday.

Highs in the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and other inland areas of L.A. County are expected to range from the mid-90s to about 105 degrees. Downtown Los Angeles and much of Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will get up to the lower 90s. Beaches will also be hot — in the lower 80s.

Moving farther east, things get really toasty. Forecasters have issued a more severe extreme heat warning for parts of the Inland Empire, where temperatures could get up to 108 degrees, and for the Coachella Valley, where they could hit 120.

Humidity will likely also continue to add to the discomfort, but will be concentrated in areas closer to the coast, where it will keep nighttime temperatures relatively warm and make it more difficult to cool down. Inland areas will feel drier.

Those who are most at-risk from the heat are people who work or spend time outside, people without access to air conditioning and those who are either over 65 or young children.

Forecasters are also warning of dangerous rip currents and swells along the coast this weekend.

If you’re headed to the beach to beat the heat, as many Southern Californians likely are, they recommend staying out of the water or, if you do go swimming, stay in front of lifeguards. It’s also a good idea to avoid jetties and tidal rocks.

Wildfire risk

This weekend will also come with a high risk of wildfires.

Forecasters warn that fire danger will be elevated through at least Monday, driven by heat, dry vegetation and low humidity levels away from the coast.

Despite some extra moisture in the air over the last several weeks, there hasn’t been enough to actually produce rain. Without precipitation, and under consistently high temperatures, plants will continue to dry out and become fuel.

“We have humidity, but it's not reaching the saturation point. Therefore, we won't have a cloud. We won't have precipitation,” said Rong Fu, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA who specializes in weather patterns and wildfires.

Fu said a system of high atmospheric pressure sitting over the Western U.S. is pushing warm, dry air across the Sierra Nevada from inland deserts and into Southern California.

That can generate what’s known as downslope wind. Those winds plus the already dry conditions align to create some especially dangerous fire weather.

One spark can easily turn into a large blaze, and humans are the most common cause of wildfires in Southern California, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

People can accidentally start wildfires in a range of ways, including throwing a lit cigarette into dry brush or dragging a chain behind a vehicle, creating sparks. One of the most common human causes is improperly extinguished camp fires.

Lightning can also start wildfires but is unlikely under current weather conditions. Southern California has seen minimal thunderstorms this summer.

The new normal?

Heatwaves in the summer and fall are obviously not new for Southern California, but they are getting worse.

Much of the heat currently blanketing the region is being driven by the high-pressure system, which traps warm air and compresses it against the ground, heating it even further. Forecasters say it’s likely to stay that way through the end of July.

But high-pressure systems like this one usually don’t stick around this long.

“For this pattern to linger almost two weeks — yeah, I would say, from a climatological point of view — that's pretty unusual,” Fu said.

One major driver of the change, Fu said, is climate change: As the climate warms, this kind of “anomalous” high pressure system will become stronger and more frequent.

And one consequence of hotter and longer heatwaves, is extended elevated periods of risky fire weather.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles will be under a heat wave advisory until Monday evening as temperatures show no signs of letting up over the weekend.

Temperatures will linger in the high 80s and low 90s in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake.

The National Weather Service projects temperatures will peak on Sunday afternoon. Meteorologist Bryan Lewis with the National Weather Service said residents can expect more humidity than usual. 

While dense, urban centers have more concrete and see more vehicle traffic, downtown and the surrounding areas will not be the hottest locations during this heatwave in the Southland, as the Antelope Valley will be under an extreme heat advisory over the weekend.

During hot weather, the beach is an immediate go-to for folks that want to stay cool, but Lewis warns against this as the surf will be extra choppy.

The Pacific Coast will see large swells “coming up from tropical systems off the coast of Mexico,” Lewis said. “We are issuing a beach hazard statement that’ll be in effect through at least the weekend [which] may be extended.” 

While the weather is expected to cool down on Monday, forecasts show that another heatwave could develop by the end of next week.

Pools nearby

Find a pool or splash pad nearest you.

Echo Park Pool

Eleanor Green Roberts Aquatic Center

Cooling centers

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Pico Union Branch Library

Felipe de Neve Branch Library (Westlake)

Pio Pico – Koreatown Branch Library

Councilmember Heather Hutt’s office recommends residents to rest in shade or a building with air conditioning and to stay hydrated with plenty of water.

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