The Brief

If you follow any cat rescue groups online, you know this time of year is rough.

You’ll see messages like these, from local nonprofits like Boyle Heights Cats, Luxe Paws and The Cat’s Meow:

“Fosters Needed Urgently”

“9 times out of 10 your garage, bathroom or basement can save a life.”

“This is an urgent plea for fosters to… help out during the 2 most challenging months of the year.”

The combination of more people taking summer vacations and the height of kitten season — the time of year when cats are most fertile — means organizations are overwhelmed trying to find fosters to care temporarily for rescues, trappers available to catch them and vets able to spay/neuter and vaccinate cats. It’s a difficult time for animal shelters too.

“So if you find kittens, if your neighbor finds kittens, if you find a cat, see what resources you can access or what resources the shelter has, and do your best,” says Dr. Kate Hurley, director of the Koret Shelter Medicine Program at UC Davis. “That's a great contribution if you can help keep even one cat or kitten out of the shelter so that they can have room for one that has absolutely no other choice.”

L.A.’s ‘community cats’

There are, according to LA Animal Services, about 960,000 “community cats” living throughout the city. These are free-roaming, stray cats that are often described as “feral” or “unsocialized."

(“Community cats” has become the preferred terminology among many animal welfare organizations because some of these cats can be more socialized than others.)

These free-roaming cats are a part of life in any city, but it's easy for populations to get out of control if not managed. Cats reproduce quickly. A female cat can have three litters per year, with the average litter being about four kittens. And cats as young as four months old can get pregnant.

That’s where TNR comes in.

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#298: Did you know that we are in the middle of kitten season? It's a super busy time for shelter workers, cat rescues, and the many Angelenos who volunteer their time to help save cats.

Today we're talking about those folks and what’s being done in L.A. and OC to try to improve the lives of free-roaming cats in Southern California.

Guests: Marisol Ramos, Boyle Heights Cats; Dr. Kate Hurley, Koret Shelter Medicine Program at UC Davis; Meredith Kirby, OC Community Cats

Why 'kitten season’ is such a tough time for LA’s cat crusaders

#298: Did you know that we are in the middle of kitten season? It's a super busy time for shelter workers, cat rescues, and the many Angelenos who volunteer their time to help save cats.

Today we're talking about those folks and what’s being done in L.A. and OC to try to improve the lives of free-roaming cats in Southern California.

Guests: Marisol Ramos, Boyle Heights Cats; Dr. Kate Hurley, Koret Shelter Medicine Program at UC Davis; Meredith Kirby, OC Community Cats

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What is TNR?

UC Davis’ Kate Hurley is also a leading authority on “trap, neuter and return” (or TNR) — a practice that is designed to reduce the number of cats on the street over time, help them live healthier lives and be less of a nuisance to their human neighbors.

The process involves cats being trapped (in rectangular wire cages that shut behind the cat when they enter) and taken to a shelter or clinic to be spayed/neutered and vaccinated for infectious diseases. During the process, one of the cats’ ears is “tipped” so they are identifiable as having been fixed after they are returned to their outdoor homes.

The result, Hurley says, are cats that are less likely to fight, spray and roam. It’s also considered a more practical and humane option than trapping and euthanizing cats, but it does have its critics.

Some cities and counties support TNR efforts — by providing traps and spay/neuter appointments or vouchers to cover part of the cost — and some don’t.

The city of L.A. was prohibited from supporting TNR for many years but in 2020 the city council signed off on the “Citywide Cat Program” to help stabilize the population by allowing TNR. It’s been in place since 2022.

Still, even in the places where there is government support, the amount of work that volunteers take on to save cats and do TNR can be daunting.

The cat crusaders

Christopher Askew (L) and Marisol Ramos (R) outside a L.A. business where workers have been feeding about a dozen community cats.

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On a warm Thursday afternoon in April, around the start of this year’s kitten season, Marisol Ramos of “Boyle Heights Cats” (“Boyle Heights Gatos” on Instagram) was already fielding many more requests for help than she could handle.

“Today I got like seven [requests] in the last three hours from people saying, ‘Help, I need to get this cat fixed.’ And it's just adding up. I have about 600 cats on a list that need to get fixed.”

Ramos’s focus is mainly Boyle Heights, where she lives, and surrounding neighborhoods. She started doing TNR in L.A. in 2021, and has since helped get more than 1,000 cats spayed or neutered.

What’s involved is a lot of communication with cat feeders and potential fosters, early mornings and late nights setting out traps and waiting for them to work, time spent fundraising for supplies and food, and the effort it takes to find spay/neuter appointments and vets that will accept vouchers the city of L.A. offers through the Citywide Cat Program. Then, when cats have been fixed, she’s back 24-48 hours later to pick them up.

Ramos does all this in addition to her day job as a researcher and grant administrator. At first she took on a second job to pay for her TNR work, but has since formed a 501(c)(3) and received a small grant.

She started doing TNR with her family in New York when she was 15 years old.

“We learned about TNR,” Ramos says, “did a community training and certification, and then we would take the subway to the city to get them fixed.”

The ‘front lines’

Now Ramos trains other people to do TNR work. Christopher Askew is one of them. He worked at a cat rescue/sanctuary and while he found that work fulfilling, he says, “it was kind of like being at an Army hospital, way back behind the enemy lines or something … [Doing TNR] is more like being right out in the front lines on the street where there's not enough being done for street cats.”

He lives in downtown L.A. and plans to do trapping there: “Downtown seems like it needs a lot of help and there's not really many people covering it. So hopefully I can maybe help fill that gap.”

Askew joined Ramos out on a call out to a business near railroad tracks, where workers were feeding about a dozen cats, to learn about what it takes to do TNR.

Marisol Ramos with Boyle Heights Cats takes a photo of some community cats she'd been called out to TNR.

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Ramos had been able to secure three spay/neuter appointments for the next day, so she was there with three traps and wet food to lure the cats in. She’d be back on Saturday to hopefully trap seven more that she’d take to appointments at a spay/neuter clinic on Sunday.

She also spends time finding adopters for kittens and other cats that can’t be returned to where they came from — if, for example, they’re sick and by the time they recover they’ve been away from the streets for too long.

But for all the work involved in doing TNR in L.A., Ramos said the situation in Orange County is much harder.

TNR is designed to reduce the number of cats on the street over time, help them live healthier lives and be less of a nuisance to their human neighbors.

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In Orange County there isn’t a large animal welfare organization doing TNR or providing low-cost vouchers. The county-run shelter doesn’t provide vouchers either, and stopped its TNR program in 2020.

In June of 2023, a Grand Jury report called on Orange County to reinstate its TNR program, saying that ending the program “increased the rate of euthanasia of cats, especially kittens.”

In a response to LAist, OC Animal Care said they’ve “been advised by counsel that the release of unowned cats into the community is prohibited by law. Since not all municipalities share this same understanding, we continue to monitor litigation processes happening around the state for rulings that may impact the penal code.”

OC Animal Care also faced a threat of legal action over their TNR program by detractors of trap-neuter-return and, more recently, was sued by supporters of TNR, who want the program reinstated. In reference to the litigation, OC Animal Care told LAist: “It is widely acknowledged that TNR plays an important role in animal welfare, and we, like the local community, look forward to clear direction on this issue, whether it be through resolution of the pending litigation or a legislative fix at the state level.”

On the question of whether TNR violates of the section of the California penal code that prohibits animal abandonment, the city of L.A.’s position is that “abandonment laws, defined by intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence leaving an animal behind, do not apply to community cat practices.”

“I've met a lot of folks from Orange County who drive up to Sun Valley to fix the cats because they just couldn't find appointments in Orange County, or help there,” Ramos says. “Or they drive to San Diego, but they try to trap a lot so it's worth their time.”

The cats of Orange County

Meredith Kirby, the volunteer coordinator for OC Community Cats, says, “When we had the shelter as a resource, that was great, because it didn't cost anything.”

Kirby has been with the nonprofit organization since it was founded in 2015. They feed and care for about 25 community cat colonies in North Orange County, which includes doing TNR and providing medical care.

In addition to the volunteer work Kirby does, she also works as a high school ceramics teacher.

In the almost 10 years she’s been with OC Community Cats, Kirby says the situation has gotten much more difficult — largely because the county shelter ended its TNR program, but also because of the shuttering of some low-cost veterinary clinics they used to rely on. There’s also a shortage of veterinarians that has grown worse.

As a result, Kirby says they’re forced to rely on donations and have to find workarounds to get cats fixed outside Orange County.

“Our transport team is a lot of retired people,” mostly women, Kirby says, who “can take 10 to 15 cats up to L.A. in the morning and go pick them up.”

But the shortage of vets is a problem in L.A. too, and across the country.

Not enough vets and vet techs

A kitten named Blizzard, up for adoption at Pasadena Humane on June 24, 2024.

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Monica Bushman

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Hurley with the Koret Shelter Medicine Program at UC Davis says the shortage of veterinarians didn’t start with the pandemic, but COVID did exacerbate it.

“The fewer vets there are, the harder it is, the more burnout there is, the more vets leave,” Hurley says. “And we're really in a negative cycle, it feels like right now, where the few vets that are standing are really stretched thin.”

That in turn has had an impact on spay/neuter rates.

“Spay/neuter in general took a huge hit during the early days of COVID,” Hurley says. “And it not only hasn't caught up, it hasn't even recovered to the baseline level that it was operating at before COVID in most places, in my experience.”

Chris Ramon, who heads up the Community Cats Program at Pasadena Humane, says another issue is a shortage of veterinary technicians and registered veterinary technicians (or RVTs).

“I have seen some of the most talented surgeons who can do a cat neuter in probably 20 seconds, no exaggeration,” Ramon says. But without a support team of technicians to help with surgery prep, anesthetization and recovery, “that veterinarian who can do a 20 second neuter is now investing 10 or 12 minutes into one case.”

The longer an appointment takes, that means fewer cats overall who can be fixed.

What can you do to help?

Even with the shortage of vets, technicians and the lack of support for TNR in some cities and counties, those who work to care for cats on Southern California streets say there are things you can do to help if you would like to get involved.

For one thing, Ramon says people often overestimate the amount of space that’s needed to foster cats and kittens. Even a bathroom, when you think about it, he says, “is a penthouse compared to a kennel at a shelter.”

There’s also lots of opportunities to volunteer or donate if fostering (or adopting) isn’t something you think will work for you.

Meredith Kirby with OC Community Cats says her number one request to those who’d like to help cats in their community is “be somebody who does something.”

“If you see an animal in need, help it. Don't go on Facebook or Instagram and go, ‘Oh, I saw this cat … Somebody go save it.’ You're somebody,” Kirby says. “If you don't know what to do, reach out to some of the local nonprofits and ask for guidance.”

Editor's note: This post has been updated to add information about the nature of the lawsuits that have been brought against OC Animal Care.

Updated April 25, 2026 at 23:44 PM ET

President Trump and the first lady are uninjured after a shooting incident at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday in Washington, D.C. A suspect is in custody, according to a statement from the U.S. Secret Service.

In remarks from the White House after the incident, the president said a Secret Service agent is "doing great" after being shot in a bulletproof vest. The Secret Service said the incident took place at a security screening area inside the venue near the entrance to the main ballroom where the event was taking place.

Trump shared surveillance footage online which appears to show law enforcement reacting to an assailant sprinting through an area of the hotel.

He also posted pictures of a man, shirtless, with his eyes closed lying face down on a carpet. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that charges would be filed against the suspect soon.

At a law enforcement press conference, Jeffery Carroll of DC's Metropolitan Police said that the suspect "was armed with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives."

Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnik takes photos as a security official points his weapon after an incident at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

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Law enforcement said they believe the suspect was a guest at the hotel. He is being charged with using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon, with more charges likely, according to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

He is being evaluated at a local hospital and was not hit by gunfire, according to law enforcement.

A chaotic scene

What sounded like gunshots were heard by gathered reporters shortly after 8:30 p.m. ET in the Washington Hilton. Several guests were seen fleeing the ballroom where hundreds of journalists, politicians and attendees were gathered — including Trump, Vice President Vance and other members of the administration.

Video from inside the room showed security quickly clear the guests on the main stage — including the president and first lady. Someone can be heard shouting "stay down."

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taken out of the ballroom by security agents during a shooting incident at the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner.

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President Trump took to social media shortly after being rushed out to praise the Secret Service.

"Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we 'LET THE SHOW GO ON' but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we'll just, plain, have to do it again," Trump wrote.

Law enforcement was seen evacuating prominent cabinet officials to rooms within the hotel, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy and FBI Director Kash Patel.

The president said in a later post that all cabinet members are safe.

First lady Melania Trump and President Trump were sitting next to each other just before they were rushed out of the ballroom at the Washington Hilton.

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Several members of Congress were seen leaving the event by foot, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.

"I said earlier tonight that journalism is a public service, because when there is an emergency, we run to the crisis, not away from it. And on a night when we are thinking about the freedoms in the First Amendment, we must also think about how fragile they are," Weijia Jiang, the president of the correspondents' association, said. "I saw all of you reporting, and that's what we do. Thank God everybody's safe and and thank you for coming together tonight. We will do this again."

Attacks on Trump and the press

Both the president and members of the press have been targeted for violence in recent years.

During his 2024 reelection effort, Trump was injured in a shooting at a July rally in Pennsylvania when a bullet whizzed past his head, grazing his ear. Two attendees were wounded, and rally-goer and former fire chief Corey Comperatore was killed.

A Secret Service sniper shot and killed the perpetrator.

In September 2024, a Secret Service agent saw a man holding a semi-automatic rifle hidden in the tree line at Trump International in West Palm Beach. The suspect fled in his car and was arrested a short time later.

White House Correspondents Association President and CBS Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang pauses while coming back to the stage to speak after a shooting incident at the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner.

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He was later sentenced to life in prison.

During the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol building, more than a dozen journalists were attacked in targeted assaults by rioters, according to a tally by the Freedom of the Press foundation. "Murder the media" was etched into a doorway during the attack.

In 2018, a man mailed pipe bombs to people and organizations he perceived to be critics of Donald Trump, including CNN offices in New York and Atlanta. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Washington Hilton, which played host to Saturday's dinner, is also the site of past political violence — in 1981, President Reagan was shot and seriously wounded outside of the hotel.

Three others were also injured in the attack, including Reagan's press secretary James Brady, who sustained brain damage and was permanently disabled in the attack. He became a gun control activist, successfully lobbying alongside his wife Sarah Brady for a background check system for firearm sales.

The White House Press Briefing Room, where Trump made brief remarks after the incident, was later renamed in his honor.

— Deepa Shivaram contributed to this report.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Before they ever picked up a paintbrush, youth artists behind a new mural in MacArthur Park started by listening.

“We interviewed people in MacArthur Park about their experiences living in the community,” said Tania Castro, a recent high school graduate and one of 20 young artists who worked on the project. “Some stories were a little bit sad because they said they lost their jobs and they need more opportunities.”

Those conversations shaped “Roots of Our Labor,” a new mural unveiled this week by LA Commons across the street from MacArthur Park. The project, led by artists Luis Mateo and Shakir Manners, draws from stories collected in a yearlong process from more than 75 residents in and around MacArthur Park.

Castro says those stories were about more than struggle.

“They also said they loved the community. In the park, you can see a lot of vendors selling things like fruit and ice cream,” she said. “And the kids love it.”

Youth artists and members of LA Commons pose for a photo in front of the "Roots of our labor" mural during its unveiling event on Thursday, April 23, in MacArthur Park.

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The mural shows a tree bearing avocados and oranges, with a trunk made of intertwined hands and a farmer harvesting the fruit. On one side, a tamale vendor is depicted selling food, and on the other, an ice cream vendor pushes a cart as children gather around him. In the background, scenes from MacArthur Park play out. 

In a neighborhood where ongoing immigration raids have fueled fear and instability, and where MacArthur Park is often defined by visible homelessness and crime, organizers said the mural is intended to highlight the diverse communities who live there and to frame the park as a shared space of connection, culture and daily life.

“I enjoyed making it because it really teaches us about the importance of community and being more inclusive and kind to each other,” said high school artist Leslie Gonzalez. “Most of the people we talked to told us about their backgrounds and they weren’t that pleasant but they still pushed through and got together for each other.”

Painted in March at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), the mural is installed on the southeastern side of the UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center.

“Immigrants are critical to the community, especially here in MacArthur Park,” said Beth Peterson, community arts program director at LA Commons. “And I think the mural does a beautiful job of really sharing that story. It really shows how the hands of immigrants have really hung together to form this very beautiful community that we live in today.” 

Detail of "Roots of Our Labor" mural at UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center. The mural celebrates workers in the Westlake community.

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For the lead artists, working alongside youth was central to how the art took shape.

“This artwork honors both the neighborhood and the people who shape it,” Mateo said. “Working with youth was essential to the process, allowing the mural to emerge from shared reflection rather than a single perspective.”

The new mural builds on LA Commons’ ongoing work in the area, following another mural unveiled last September at MacArthur Park Elementary School. “Roots of Our Labor” is the organization’s second mural supported by Stop the Hate, a statewide initiative led by the Asian American and Pacific Islander community aimed at addressing hate incidents and promoting cross-cultural understanding.

LA Commons, a nonprofit arts organization that creates community-based public art projects through partnerships and a mix of public and private funding, has been in the MacArthur Park area for more than 20 years. Its first public art project in the neighborhood was in 2003. “Roots of Our Labor” is its 22nd public art project in MacArthur Park.

Detail of "Roots of Our Labor" mural at UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center. The mural celebrates workers in the Westlake community.

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Manners, the artist, described the mural as a reflection of what he sees as the underlying spirit of MacArthur Park.

It represents “the unseen hands that sustain communities, emphasizing that true progress is built collectively through persistence, sacrifice and shared purpose,” he said.

For Gonzalez, the mural is personal as well as something tied closely to her community.

“I feel like a light has shone on me and I’m proud of it because I’ve never done anything this big before,” she said. 

The post New mural celebrates labor, multicultural community around MacArthur Park appeared first on LA Local.

The phone lines at the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station are back up after more than two months of outages caused by copper wire theft.  

The update comes just one week after Boyle Heights Beat reported on the issue, and residents raised concerns at a Maravilla Community Advisory Committee (MCAC) meeting on April 7 about difficulty reaching the station by phone for non-emergencies.

According to the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station, service was restored on Thursday, April 23. By Friday, all dispatchers were back working in the station after temporarily operating out of an off-site communications trailer connected via satellite. 

“This was made possible due to the concerted efforts of the East Los Angeles Sheriff Station Captains Hinchman and Kusayanagi, AT&T, and our Communications & Fleet Management Bureau,” the station said in a statement to the Beat. 

The station also thanked Assemblymember Jessica Caloza’s office and community stakeholders who contacted AT&T to express urgency.

Sheriff’s officials previously said they had called Caloza’s office to help speed up repairs by communicating with AT&T.

What went wrong

According to Sgt. Michael Mileski, the outage was caused by an incident on Feb. 13, where several thousand dollars’ worth of copper wiring was stolen from an electrical vault near the station. Fiber optic cables were damaged in the process, which affected a significant portion of the Eastern Avenue corridor in Boyle Heights and East L.A., disrupting phone lines for 100,000 residents for five days, Mileski said. 

AT&T said in a statement that copper cable outages generally take five times longer to repair on average than fiber outages. 

Copper wire theft has plagued the Eastside in recent years, leaving communities in the dark and disabling public facilities.  

LA Documenter Alex Medina contributed reporting for this story. LA Documenters trains and pays LA residents to take notes at local government meetings around Los Angeles. You can find meeting notes and audio at losangeles.documenters.org

The story Phone lines restored at East LA Sheriff’s Station after 2-month outage due to copper wire theft appeared first on LA Local.

Californians this fall will decide whether to require voters to show proof of citizenship before casting ballots.

A GOP-backed voter ID ballot initiative on Friday qualified for the Nov. 3 ballot, marking a significant win for San Diego Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who led the signature-gathering campaign. DeMaio and other Republican operatives have pushed for tighter voter restrictions in deep-blue California for years.

If voters approve it, they would be required to show a government-issued ID each time they go to the polls, while mail-in ballots would need the last-four digits of an ID, such as a driver’s license. The secretary of state and county election offices would also be required to verify voters’ registration each time they vote.

Currently, voters only need to provide an ID and Social Security number when they register to vote. Thirty-six states require or recommend voters show some form of identification at the polls, according to a 2025 report by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“This is an initiative that’s incredibly popular amongst Democrats and Republicans,” GOP state Sen. Tony Strickland of Huntington Beach told CalMatters. “I think the only way we don’t get this passed is if we get [outspent]. So we’re working very hard with an on-the-ground campaign apparatus.”

Strickland and others who have helped lead the campaign attribute the initiative’s rapid certification to Julie Luckey, mother of tech billionaire Palmer Luckey who helped seed the majority of the $10 million the campaign committee has raised in the past year.

Voting rights groups say the initiative will suppress turnout among eligible voters who don’t have the documents on hand, many of whom are disproportionately poor and people of color.

Opponents, including the state’s most powerful labor unions, plan to campaign heavily against it.

Voter fraud is rare in California. However, claims of fraud and concerns about election integrity have risen since President Donald Trump touted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Californians broadly support voter identification at the polls but are split along ideological lines when given specific details about the ballot measure, according to a 2026 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. When told the measure is meant to combat voter fraud and that it could suppress eligible votes, support dipped to 37%.