The Brief

It’s official: Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance is now the most watched of all time.

And one of the most dissected moments has been the surprise appearance by tennis legend Serena Williams, who crip walked to Lamar’s hit dis track, “Not Like Us.”

It wasn’t the first time Williams brought that fancy footwork to a massive audience. She was criticized for doing it in 2012 after winning gold at the London Olympics and in 2023 for doing it at Wimbledon.

So why do it again at the Super Bowl? Was it simply because the Pulitzer-Prize winning rapper asked her to, as she noted in a recent Instagram post. Or was it something more?

Activist and academic Shamell Bell says it was.

“For me, the dance form is a form of liberation,” said Bell, a Harvard University lecturer whose doctoral research focuses on dance as grassroots political action. Last week, she led a dance workshop at UC Irvine that heavily featured the crip walk.

“It’s the embodiment of coming from South Central Los Angeles,” she said. “I come from those streets.”

Shamell Bell, second from right, leads a group in a demonstration of the crip walk at UC Irvine.

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Dana Littlefield

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LAist

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What are the origins of the crip walk?

There’s some debate about when and where the crip walk, or C walk, first appeared.

One story is that a version of it emerged decades ago when acclaimed Harlem dancer Henry Heard — a double amputee who was known by the nickname “Crip” — performed in the 1940s.

Far more often, it’s associated with members of the Crips street gang in Los Angeles, whose members started doing a dance — some have called it a ritual — in the 1970s. And one of the Crips’ original members, Robert “Sugar Bear” Jackson, has been cited as its creator.

It was seen as a way of showing one’s gang affiliation, particularly in contrast to Bloods gang members.

When doing the crip walk, a person will hop from one foot to the other, twisting and turning the feet at angles, sometimes forming the letters C-R-I-P. The arms are usually held up and bent inward at the elbows, with the dancer sometimes throwing up gang-related hand signs.

David Cha of Los Angeles learns to crip walk during a workshop at UCI.

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Dana Littlefield

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The dance has appeared in movies, music videos and other aspects of popular culture, notably ones centered on West Coast hip-hop. In 2022, the crip walk made its first Super Bowl halftime appearance, when Snoop Dogg — who is from Long Beach — performed with other artists, including Eminem, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige and of course Compton legends Dr. Dre and Lamar himself.

Also from Compton: Serena Williams.

So why is it controversial?

More than a week after the Super Bowl, debate about the show — and the C walk — is still going strong.

Some commenters said they recognized messages in the halftime show that went much deeper than the beef between Lamar and his rap rival Drake. Other commenters said they didn’t like it, didn’t get it, or didn’t think it deserved a platform at the NFL’s biggest event.

“Some folks believe that because of its impetus and beginning in violence that we should not be crip walking as a form of radical joy,” said Bell, who was an original organizer within the Black Lives Matter movement in L.A.

But the meaning behind the C walk has evolved with the times.

Today, there are countless crip walk tutorials on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Some dance instructors work the moves into their in-person classes.

Bell said she’s been using street dances like the crip walk as a form of social justice activism and encountered three main reactions:

1. Those who say it should only be performed by people linked to the gang.
2. Those who say it should never be performed in public because of its links to violence.
3. Those who say the dance has positive connotations, like community and connection.

Bell said crip walking in spaces like the Super Bowl is in some ways repurposing it.

“It’s about turning it on its head, kind of like what you’re doing with the N-word,” Bell said.

Bringing the C walk to the masses

And she’s put that message into practice.

In 2019, Bell drew attention on social media when she crip walked to celebrate earning her Ph.D. In a video clip shared by the UCLA department of African American studies, many people in the room can be seen celebrating with her.

The two-hour workshop she led Thursday night was part of a broader "theater of community" event put on by the university. About a dozen people took part in the session, including Zachary Price, an associate professor of drama at the university.

Price said he saw the crip walk — at the Super Bowl or elsewhere — as a form of cultural expression emerging from the “many permutations of the Black experience.” He explained that it’s part of an African American vernacular that stretches from chattel slavery to Black Lives Matter and beyond.

“I think of these different dance forms as expressive forms but also as [social] movements,” he said.

Daniel Keeling, an assistant professor, dances with others at the UCI workshop.

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Dana Littlefield

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Daniel Keeling, an assistant professor at UC Irvine’s Drama Department, also participated in the workshop. Originally from Kansas, he said his musical background skewed more toward musical theater and opera, but he’s been listening to hip-hop more now that he’s a California resident.

He said he had been following the beef between Lamar and Drake, and the crip walk had caught his attention.

“It’s what the culture is feeling,” he said.

The Los Angeles region’s homelessness agency will miss a Tuesday deadline for submitting its federally required annual audit of the agency’s financial records, which could jeopardize its federal funding.

LAHSA executives blamed the delay on a “perfect storm” of leadership changes and competing priorities within LAHSA’s finance department, including an L.A. County review of LAHSA’s delayed payments to contractors.

“Our staff made a good-faith effort to meet the deadline,” interim CEO Gita O’Neill said at a LAHSA Commission meeting Tuesday. “However, over the past year, we've experienced several transitions. As a result, we could not get all the required materials to the auditors as quickly as needed.”

Each year, LAHSA, like all non-federal agencies and organizations that get substantial federal dollars, is required to hire an outside auditor to determine whether it’s properly tracking and reporting the taxpayer funds it manages.

LAHSA’s single audit report for last fiscal year was due March 31, nine months after fiscal year 2024-2025 ended. Earlier this month, LAHSA officials said they were on track to meet the March 31 deadline.

Justin Measley, lead auditor for the firm CliftonLarsonAllen, had warned that LAHSA was months behind schedule turning over records.

At a meeting Tuesday, Measley explained that because of LAHSA’s earlier delays, the firm would need at least an additional week to complete a quality-control review process.

“We’re moving at the fastest pace we possibly can,” Measley said.

On Tuesday, LAHSA officials said the single audit will be filed “at the earliest possible opportunity,” within the next few weeks.

Federal funds at risk

LAHSA manages hundreds of millions of federal dollars each year, through grants from the U.S. Office of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.

O’Neill said the agency has been communicating with HUD officials regularly about the missed audit deadline and is “hoping for understanding.”

Janine Lim, LAHSA’s deputy chief financial officer, said she’s also been talking with HUD.

“They seem amenable to our situation and to our stated timelines,” Lim said. “So, we are hopeful that this will be a good outcome, despite having missed the deadline.”

HUD did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment Tuesday.

What went wrong 

Measley said LAHSA’s financial statements should have been turned over around last December, but LAHSA only submitted them this month, after blowing through multiple extended deadlines.

Measley said he contacted LAHSA’s governing commission about the overdue documents March 3.

He said he also previewed his firm’s findings, noting one “significant deficiency” in its draft report, related to LAHSA’s timeliness in detecting accounting errors.

LAHSA could contest those findings, officials said. That would add additional back-and-forth between the homelessness agency and accounting firm before the audit report is ready to file.

Justin Szlasa, a LAHSA commissioner who chairs the audit subcommittee, told LAHSA’s CEO he’s concerned that there was no time provided for LAHSA’s governing body to review the audit report.

“Next year, we will absolutely do that,” O’Neill responded. “I think this year, we were under the gun, and so we felt it was the most important thing was to get it uploaded on time.”

O’Neill said the agency hired accounting firm KPMG to help modernize LAHSA’s financial systems, with a focus on its contractor payments.

“We have an outside, trusted voice to help us create a system that works going forward because the system we have is not working at all, in finance,” O’Neill said.

Updated March 31, 2026 at 20:44 PM ET

President Trump on Tuesday escalated his efforts to reshape American elections, signing an executive order that seeks to create lists of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state, and instructing the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified voters.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he believes the order is legally "foolproof." But election experts said the order was unconstitutional, and voting rights advocates and Democratic state officials quickly pledged to sue to block the order from going into effect.

A previous executive order on elections, signed about a year ago, has been blocked by federal judges who said the president lacked the constitutional authority to set voting policy.

The Constitution says the "Times, Places and Manner" of federal elections are determined by individual states, with Congress able to enact changes.

"This Executive Order is a disgusting overreach from the federal government and shows how little the Trump Administration understands about election administration," Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state of Arizona, said in a statement Tuesday. "We will not let this order stand without a fight and will meet the federal government in court," he added.

Arizona is among more than two dozen states Trump's Department of Justice has sued over access to sensitive voter data.

The Trump administration claims it needs the data to enforce states' voter list maintenance. Federal judges in three states have dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuits in those states.

In another case, a DOJ official admitted in court last week that the department plans to share that voter data with the Department of Homeland Security, to run it through the so-called SAVE system to search for noncitizens.

NPR has reported that some U.S. citizens have also been inaccurately flagged by SAVE.

How the executive order seeks to change voting

Trump has long railed — baselessly — about widespread illegal voting by noncitizens and fraud associated with mail ballots.

The new executive order — which was first reported by The Daily Caller — takes aim at both.

It instructs the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to "compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State."

The order then "requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List, ensuring that only eligible absentee or mail-in voters receive absentee or mail-in ballots," according to a White House fact sheet.

Trump's executive order claims that "additional measures are necessary" to secure voting by mail, a form of voting he has used himself — including last week — but also falsely maligned for years. In the 2024 general election, nearly a third of all voters cast mail ballots.

The Postal Service should also review the design of mail ballot envelopes to protect "the integrity of Federal elections," the order says.

Collectively, the provisions would be a significant change to how mail ballot programs are currently administered in American elections, which are largely carried out by state and local officials.

"Our government's citizenship lists are incomplete and inaccurate. The United States Postal Service is overburdened and inadequate. This combines a car crash with a train wreck," the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voting access and sued to block Trump's 2025 election executive order, said in a statement.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, wrote on his blog that the order is likely unconstitutional. And regardless, he added, "the timing here makes this virtually impossible to implement in time for November's elections. … It seems highly unlikely any of this could be implemented for 2026, even if it were not blocked by courts."

The order comes as Trump pressures Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping election overhaul that would impose new voter identification and documentation requirements.

That bill is stalled in the Senate due to Democratic opposition and the legislative filibuster.

The Supreme Court is also expected to rule this year on whether Mississippi should be allowed to count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received by election officials after Election Day.

The legal challenge, which could have sweeping implications for mail voting nationwide, was filed by the Republican National Committee and Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

With reporting by Ben Swasey

Copyright 2026 NPR

Federal immigration officials arrested more than 14,000 people in the greater Los Angeles area in 2025 — the majority of whom had no criminal record, according to an LAist analysis of new data from the Deportation Data Project.

The data project, an initiative between UCLA and UC Berkeley, publishes federal data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 2025, federal officials arrested 14,394 people, up from 4,681 the year prior. Forty-six percent of people arrested had criminal convictions, 15% had pending charges, and 39% had no criminal charges or convictions.

In a December news release, the Department of Homeland Security said it had arrested more than 10,000 people in the L.A. area since immigration raids began in June of last year, including "murderers, kidnappers, sexual predators and armed carjackers,” but did not publish details of the number of people who had criminal records.

The data from the Deportation Data Project shows that arrests in L.A. spiked in June, and about two-thirds of people arrested that month had no criminal convictions.

More than 313,000 people were arrested by ICE nationwide in 2025, according to an LAist analysis.

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency has not “verified the accuracy, methodology or analysis of the project and its results” and said “this only reveals how data is manipulated to peddle the false narrative that DHS is not targeting the worst of the worst.” The spokesperson said 61% of people ICE arrested across the country either had criminal convictions or pending charges.

The agency has regularly published press releases identifying people they have arrested and who they have called “the worst of the worst,” including from the raids in L.A. in June. But an LAist investigation and reporting from other outlets has found that some of the people on those lists already has been in custody and were serving lengthy sentences.

Small businesses struggling financially have another program they could qualify for to help pay the bills.

The program is for businesses in Council District 1, which includes the neighborhoods of Koreatown, Pico Union, Westlake, MacArthur Park and Highland Park.

Individual brick-and-mortar businesses can qualify for grants ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, while street vendors can receive about $3,000, according to city officials. A total of $400,000 is available through the program, and applications are now open. 

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez announced the program’s goal, describing it as a way to support locally owned businesses navigating rising operating costs, shifting customer patterns, and the impacts of recent wide-scale events, like the ongoing immigration raids, along with wildfires, and broader economic uncertainty.

Small businesses struggling financially have another program they could qualify for to help pay the bills.

Who is eligible?

The program is open to independently owned businesses and street vendors located within District 1.

To qualify, businesses must have a valid Los Angeles business license and have been operating in Council District 1 since December 2020, with some flexibility for street vendors. They also need to show they’ve been financially impacted by any largescale events, like the COVID pandemic, immigration enforcement, or the broader economy. Businesses that changed owners can also apply if they’re essentially running the same operation.

How can the money be used?

Grants can be used for daily operational expenses, including rent, payroll, utilities, overhead and other business costs. Roochnik said the funding could also help businesses cover missed rent payments.

Who is running the program?

The grants will be distributed in partnership with the PACE Business Development Center and New Economics for Women. The two organizations provide support to small and immigrant-owned businesses across Los Angeles.

How will recipients be selected?

Funding will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, with applications remaining open until funds run out, Roochnik said. 

What’s the goal?

Hernandez said the program is meant to help stabilize neighborhoods that have been affected by immigration enforcement and economic hardships.

“These small businesses are the backbone of our neighborhoods,” she said, adding the funding is meant to help them “stay open, keep workers employed, and continue serving our communities.”

Naomi Villagomez Roochnik, CD1 communications director, said the announcement was made during a press conference at Delicias Bakery and Some, a longtime Latina-owned business in Highland Park. The neighborhood has experienced significant rising rents due to gentrification and the location was meant to highlight the kinds of businesses the program is meant to support.

How to apply:

To apply, small businesses and vendors can complete the application at bit.ly/cd1smallbizsupport.

Is this a one-time program or part of a larger effort?

The grant is part of a pilot program, with the possibility of it expanding depending on demand and outcomes. The council office has launched similar aid efforts in the past, Roochnik said, such as food distribution and rental assistance. 

Businesses that may not qualify for this specific grant can be connected to other resources, according to Roochnik, including the city’s legacy business program, which is for businesses operating for at least 20 years. 

The post Small businesses, vendors struggling against ICE raids, economic uncertainty eligible for up to $10,000 in grants appeared first on LA Local.