The Brief

Another immigrant died in the custody of federal immigration authorities in California, raising new questions about the care of detainees amid the Trump administration’s historic mass deportation campaign.

In an announcement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Huabing Xie, an immigrant from China, had a seizure Friday at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico and died that afternoon.

Xie had been detained at the Calexico detention center since last month. ICE alleged that Xie was in the U.S. without legal status and said federal agents arrested him on Sept. 12 in Indio.

Staffers at the center gave Xie CPR and used a defibrillator, a medical device typically used to shock a patient’s heart, according to ICE. But Xie was later pronounced dead at El Centro Regional Medical Center.

Imperial County immigrants’ rights advocates said they were saddened and angered by the news. Imperial Liberation Collaborative organizer Marina Arteaga said Xie’s death fit into a pattern marked by dwindling oversight and increasingly harsh conditions at federal detention centers across the country.

“This is not an isolated incident,” Arteaga told KPBS on Monday.

Arteaga and other immigrants’ rights advocates are demanding that ICE release more details and calling on state and county authorities to investigate Xie’s death.

On Monday, ICE said an investigation was underway but declined to answer further questions.

More immigrants are dying in federal detention

Xie’s case was the second reported death of an immigrant in ICE custody in California in two weeks.

On Sept. 21, 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe died inside ICE’s detention center in the High Desert city of Adelanto after developing a cough and fever. ICE has also said they are investigating Ayala-Uribe’s death.

The incidents come amid what several Democratic senators have called the deadliest six-month period for immigrants in federal detention nationwide since 2018.

ICE has publicly reported that at least 14 people have died in its custody since January. In a letter earlier this year, Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock said the agency had also failed to acknowledge a fifteenth death at a county jail in New York State.

(ICE has since publicly confirmed that death but has yet to list it on the agency’s official detainee death tracking page as of Monday.)

Ayala-Uribe and Xie bring the total to 17.

That string of in-custody deaths comes as ICE races to expand its massive detention network. Flush with $45 billion in new funding from Congress, the agency is building new tent camps and expanding its use of military bases in a mad rush to fulfill President Donald Trump’s vow of mass deportations.

In Imperial County, Arteaga said that rush has also come with a crackdown on transparency.

Arteaga and the Collaborative have been visiting the Imperial County detention center since 2022 to spend time with detainees and document their experiences. They were completely shut out as of this August, she said.

“We have not been able to go inside the facility,” Arteaga said. “We don't know what's going on.”

What we know about Xie’s death

Beyond what ICE has already described, the circumstances of Xie’s death are unclear.

A spokesperson for El Centro Regional Medical Center reached by phone Friday also declined to comment.

One important question, Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition executive director Daniela Flores said, is whether immigration agents used force against Xie during his arrest or detention.

Another question, she said, is whether Xie had any existing medical conditions that could lead to seizures — and whether he reported any symptoms to staff at the detention center.

“That is putting myself into his family's shoes,” Flores said. “Knowing that they probably want answers.”

Earlier this year, the California Attorney General’s office found that the Imperial County detention center was struggling to hire a medical director, leading to “delays in addressing clinical errors by lower-level health staff.”

Flores is asking state Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Imperial County public health officials to investigate.

In its statement Friday, ICE said U.S. Border Patrol agents first arrested Xie in 2023 near the eastern San Diego County town of Tecate. The agency said Xie was placed in removal proceedings and released.

KPBS could not locate any criminal records for Xie.

Local officials face calls for accountability

To Flores and Arteaga, Xie’s death highlights a lack of oversight of the Imperial Regional Detention Facility by elected officials.

The detention center is run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a private, for-profit company based in Centerville, Utah. The facility holds up to 782 detainees. In 2022, ICE reported that it spent more than $44 million on the facility every year.

The detention center has faced allegations of abuse in the past. In 2021, Carlos Murillo Vega, who grew up in Imperial County, sued MTC for holding him in solitary confinement for over a year. In 2022, nine detainees said in a civil rights complaint that their cells were moldy and the water tasted like bleach.

California has given county officials the power to inspect ICE detention centers in their jurisdiction. But Imperial County and most others have not used that power, Calmatters reported earlier this month.

In an email to KPBS, Calexico Mayor Diana Noricumbo said the detention center is located in an unincorporated part of the city, outside their jurisdiction.

KPBS also reached out to Imperial County’s five supervisors and a county spokesperson. None responded to questions by publication time.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

An 80-unit affordable housing development opened Thursday in Koreatown, adding new housing in one of Los Angeles’ most densely populated neighborhoods.  

City leaders and community members gathered to celebrate the opening of Atto on Hobart, a seven-story affordable housing development in Koreatown that will provide 73 one-bedroom apartments and seven studios for households earning up to 80% and 120% of the area median income, depending on the unit.

Developer Leo Lee, who grew up in Koreatown, has spent years trying to redevelop the area. While he praised the city’s faster approval process, he said getting projects financed remains a major obstacle.

The opening comes as Koreatown continues to face mounting housing pressures. The area is one of the densest in Los Angeles, with more than 39,000 residents per square mile. About one in five residents lives below the federal poverty level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Lee said the building’s name reflects what he hopes the project represents.

“The name of the project is called Atto. The reason for the name is, my wife told me, ‘Atto is a Korean word. It means gift, it means thank you,'” he told reporters. 

Income eligibility will be verified by the Los Angeles Housing Department.

The project at 611 S. Hobart Blvd. is the first affordable housing development in Koreatown completed under Mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Directive 1, the 2022 order that streamlines city approvals for 100% affordable housing developments.

A staged bedroom is shown inside a unit at Atto on Hobart in Koreatown on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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The city’s goal is to remove bureaucratic hurdles that have historically slowed affordable housing construction, Bass said.

“Everybody has told me how difficult it is to build anything in the city, but especially housing, and that the number one reason it was difficult, because of all of the unnecessary red tape,” she said. 

City officials say the order has accelerated more than 47,000 affordable housing units through the development pipeline citywide, though many remain in various stages of planning and construction.

On Monday, city officials and nonprofit partners opened a converted Craftsman home with 19 affordable housing units for veterans in Harvard Heights and south of Koreatown.

Steve Kang, president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, said projects like Atto help address the challenges facing a neighborhood where many families struggle with high housing costs.

“So for our community, building more affordable housing isn’t just about adding units or density,” Kang said. “It’s about ensuring that our families, our seniors and working Angelenos get to stay right here in the heart of Koreatown.”

On an overcast morning in July, marine biologist Greg Rouse knelt next to a large tide pool near La Jolla’s Bird Rock.

“This place is incredibly diverse in habitats,” Rouse said, scooping a sample of seawater into a plastic bag.

A few miles down the beach, in his seaside lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Rouse separated the sampled water into a petri dish.

At first glance it was just water and some floating ocean debris.

But when Rouse slid the petri dish under a microscope, hundreds of nearly-microscopic animals burst into life on a high-resolution monitor: shrimps and snails, pillbug-like isopods, worms of all sorts of different shapes, and at least one bright-orange sea slug.

Sampling tide pools like this is fairly routine for Rouse, but lately, it has been part of something bigger. Rouse is leading the first phase of an effort to document California’s intertidal ecosystems.

That means logging every organism found in the tidal seawater, sand and rocks from San Diego to the Oregon border over the next two years.

“It's a baseline of what is here right now,” Rouse said. “It's a shame we didn't do this 20 or 40 years ago. But in those times, we didn't really have the DNA technology and the cost efficiency that we have these days.”

The project, called the California Intertidal Biodiversity DNA Barcode Library project, is ambitious. Nothing of this scale has been attempted in the U.S. It’s being led by a coalition of top research institutions, including Scripps, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the California Ocean Protection Council and the Southern California Coastal Research Project.

The goal is to create a comprehensive picture of California’s tidal habitats by focusing on the algae and invertebrates that live in them, including their DNA profiles. Scientists say that will let them more effectively track changes in those ecosystems.

Scientists building the biological library are focused on the nearly microscopic invertebrates and algae that live in California's tidal regions, which are less well understood than more visible fish, birds and mammals.

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Lucas Brady Woods

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LAist

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The intertidal region is made up of the narrow strip of coastline that alternates between being submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide. It’s habitats are some of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising water temperatures and sea levels.

The two-year project launched with $10 million in state funding earlier this year but kicked into high gear this summer.

Last month, Rouse led a group of dozens of scientists to the tide pools, where they pulled more than 7,000 samples from the area around Bird Rock.

“Anything we could see, we took. But also we took a lot of stuff you can't see back to the lab and had many people on microscopes finding all the tiny creatures,” Rouse said. “Because most of the diversity is actually too small to see.”

Testing is still underway, but so far the samples represent 1,600 species of invertebrates and algae, hundreds of which could be new to science.

Biological library housed in L.A. 

Once collected and analyzed at Scripps, the physical specimens and their DNA profiles will be sent to the L.A. County Museum of Natural History where they will be stored in a massive library.

The museum was chosen in part because it has the largest collection of invertebrates in the U.S., outside of the Smithsonian Institution.

The project will be focused on invertebrates and algae because fish, mammals and other big, visible animals have been sampled plenty. Scientists say there is a major gap in the understanding of the tiny tide pool organisms that play a key role in the wider ecosystem.

“It's all about a food chain … and we don't have a good grounding of who's eating whom,” said Regina Wetzer, curator of marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum. “It's a whole cascade of networks that feed the larger things that are carnivorous fish or that are birds."

A nudibranch mollusk, a type of sea slug called Vassyeria, was one of the thousands of organisms collected recently in La Jolla. It's seen here under a microscope.

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Greg Rouse

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Scripps Institute of Oceanography

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Among the new species found by the recent tide pool sampling is this polychaete scaleworm, seen here under a microscope.

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Greg Rouse

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Scripps Institute of Oceanography

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Protecting the coast

Building this biological library is not just for the sake of expanding scientific understanding. It’s also practical.

Without a clear baseline to reference, said Dean Pentcheff, project manager of the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, scientists have been largely operating in the dark.

“To responsibly manage the shore and manage our resources and manage the life on it, we need to know who's where and who's who,” Pentcheff said. “And right now, for the intertidal [zone], we don't know that.”

The DNA library will lay the groundwork for new, powerful tools scientists can use to monitor changes in the tidal ecosystem.

One of those is environmental DNA, or E-DNA, the biological detritus that naturally sloughs off organisms. Collecting samples of water or sand, and the E-DNA in it, can provide a quick snapshot of an ecosystem when compared to a baseline.

At L.A.'s Natural History Museum Regina Wetzer, left, a curator, and Dean Pentcheff, head of the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, discuss the logistics of building the tidal "biolibrary."

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Lucas Brady Woods

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LAist

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“That's a list of all the organisms that are there, but you can't put a name to any of them unless you have a reference library to look it up in,” Pentcheff said. “So our job in this project is to cruise up and down the state and create that library of genetic reference sequences to enable environmental DNA to be used in the future.”

The library will also be designed to allow for different levels of DNA sequencing, from basic DNA profiles, called barcodes, that are quick and easy to produce, to much more complex profiles that provide detailed information on an organism.

Backed by California taxpayers 

The tools the project is expected to unlock have also galvanized the officials in charge of protecting the state’s marine environments.

“Where are invasive species showing up? What's happening with species range shifts as things migrate northward? Those are the kinds of questions that we can answer, start to answer with a lot of this information,” said Mike Esgro, a member of the California Ocean Protection Council who oversees the state’s Marine Protected Areas.

California’s Marine Protected Areas cover about 16% of California’s coastal waters. They are specific geographical areas in the ocean or around coastal estuaries designed to protect and conserve marine life and habitats.

Esgro hopes the DNA library, and emerging tools like E-DNA that rely on it, will improve how officials manage these places. For example, it could help officials better understand which ones are most vulnerable and identify additional marine environments that need state protection.

It could even help scientists figure out how to shift tidal habitats inland to compensate for rising sea levels.

He also wants to see continued collaboration with state agencies like the Ocean Protection Council and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And he hopes the California project, which he calls the “Noah’s Ark of intertidal diversity,” can serve as an example. Scientists in California are already looking at other possible DNA libraries focused on insects and fungi.

“The climate crisis is very real. It's very urgent. We're seeing the impacts right now,” Esgro said. “And so I think adopting that kind of mindset of — ‘We gotta go big; we gotta swing for the fences’ — that's crucial.”

This story first appeared in the Boyle Heights Beat.

Air regulators on Thursday ordered Lineage Logistics to strengthen odor-control measures, expand air monitoring and improve communication with residents as cleanup of the burned warehouse continues.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing board unanimously approved an abatement order on the second day of a public hearing into a series of air quality violations tied to the June fire in Boyle Heights.

The board did not require Lineage to pay any financial penalties, which several elected officials, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, had requested in light of the numerous air quality violations it had been issued.

Lineage is required, among other things, to:

• Each day remove 10%, or about 8.8 million pounds, of the food waste stored in the facility at the time of the fire; 
• Conduct more monitoring for airborne pollutants further from the warehouse; 
• Increase communication with the community, including providing updates on the cleanup in Spanish.

Many of the order’s requirements had already been implemented at the site, Lineage representatives said, while the community communication plan and increased air quality monitoring is expected to happen within five days.

Representatives for AQMD said the order was designed to strike a balance between swift food waste removal and work to control the odors plaguing the community. AQMD focuses specifically on air pollution regulation.

Dominic DiCarlo, Lineage’s vice president of global safety and compliance, said that he believes all of the rotting bulk food items will be removed by next week, without citing a specific date. He added that it would take another week to remove the rest of the material and fully disinfect the facility.

Bass ordered that all biohazard food waste be removed from the facility by Aug. 14. It’s unclear if Lineage will meet the mayor’s deadline.

DiCarlo said the company expects to spend between $80 million and $100 million on the cleanup and remediation of the burn site. He claims that about 80% of the approximately 88 million pounds of food stored at the facility has been removed to about 10 landfills and recycling facilities in Southern California and Arizona.

“This order will ensure that there are enforceable conditions on [Lineage] as it completes this cleanup project, which will minimize odor impacts on the community and expedite removal of food waste which is the source of these odors,” said Josephine Lee, senior deputy counsel for AQMD.

A new guide from a group of local scientists helps Angelenos affected by the 2025 L.A. fires navigate questions about soil testing and clean up.

The guidelines are based on soil tests conducted by USC CLEAN and Community Action Project Los Angeles on more than 6,000 lots in and around burn zones in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Sujeet Rao, the health and well-being practice director at Public Exchange at USC, who contributed to the guide, said it's a response to questions that he and other contributors knew residents had.

“We all came together … to help fire affected families understand and navigate questions they may have about environmental contamination related to the fires,” Rao said.

The guide includes information about soil contamination, testing, cleanup methods and ways to reduce your exposure risk.

The dangers of soil contamination

When the Eaton and Palisades fires burned down houses and garages, items including paint, kitchen appliances and car batteries released dangerous substances into the environment.

Exposure to these substances can increase the risk of respiratory, neurological and reproductive problems, as well as certain cancers.

Lead was the most common concern, according to the scientists’ testing.

Rao said that’s worrying because lead is a neurotoxin.

“What that means is that [for] especially young children whose brains are still developing or women who are pregnant, lead can affect the development of the brain,” Rao said.

Should you test your soil? 

Rao said it’s hard to say whether any specific property needs soil testing or cleanup, but gave some general guidelines.

If your house burned, definitely.

If you saw ash in the air, on the ground or otherwise near your house during the fires, get your soil tested.

If not, testing is likely unnecessary.

Other things to consider are the age of the houses that burned and their proximity to your property.

“We do know that if you’re in a neighborhood that has a lot of old housing, it is more likely that there is lead that could have been mobilized,” Rao said. “The inverse of that is, in the Palisades, we generally see much lower levels of lead contamination because the housing there tends to be so much newer.”

What to know about soil testing

The guide suggests two main options for going about testing.

One option is to hire specialists to come to your house to collect and test samples.

The other option is collect samples yourself and submit them to a testing program, such as USC CLEAN.

In the testing results, look for contaminant levels that exceed the residential limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency or the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.

Both account for how the area is used, including whether children are playing outside or people are gardening.

Cleanup methods

If your soil test results are above the EPA or DTSC limits, the guide offers four main methods to clean it up.

1. Excavation: Removing the soil, throwing it out at a disposal facility and replacing it with clean soil.
2. Capping: Putting clean soil, gravel or another physical barrier between the contaminated soil and the people and animals who may come into contact with it.
3. Immobilization: Adding compost, phosphorus or other materials to stop the spread of contaminants.
4. Bioremediation: Putting plants, bacteria or fungi into the affected soil to break down biodegradable contaminants.

Some soil remediation can be paid for through insurance. Costs will depend on the size of your yard and which contaminants are present. The guide estimates that the least costly options are capping and immobilization, which can run around $10,000.

The full soil remediation guide is on the Consortium website.