The Brief

Tucked inside the Port of Los Angeles, an industrial island has become an unexpected flashpoint in the federal immigration crackdown.

Terminal Island is best known for housing shipyards, warehouses and the remnants of a Japanese American fishing village demolished during WWII.

But since the immigration sweeps began last month in L.A., the island has also become a hub for the agents staging at the federal facility there — and the locals keeping watch over them on behalf of their immigrant neighbors.

Soon after the sweeps began, Harbor Area Peace Patrols began sending volunteers to monitor the government vehicles streaming in and out of the sole access road to the gated facility, which holds a U.S. Coast Guard base and a low-security prison.

“We have people do shifts at Terminal Island throughout the day because it is such a strategic point,” said one of the volunteers, Victor Maldonado.

The Harbor Area patrollers say they’ve been able to tie about 60 of the government vehicles passing through Terminal Island to raids around the state, including a particularly chaotic operation at a cannabis farm in Camarillo.

Volunteers with Harbor Area Peace Patrols monitor Terminal Island for government vehicles.

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Josie Huang

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LAist

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ICE watch

Thousands of people have been arrested since the sweeps started June 6 in Los Angeles. During this period, local efforts to block raids have surged, with outraged residents patrolling their neighborhoods and sounding the alarm if they see agents.

The Harbor Area patrol formed within days of the first sweeps, with support from Union del Barrio.

Every morning, at 6:30 a.m., volunteers meet at local spot for their assignments before getting into their cars.

Aside Terminal Island, patrols also span Wilmington, San Pedro and Carson and involve scanning parking lots for agents and notifying undocumented workers of constitutional rights.

Some volunteers, including Maldonado, keep gravitating to Terminal Island because their information-gathering could have implications for people far beyond the port.

Almost daily, the Carson resident crosses the Vincent Thomas Bridge onto the island before he starts his day as an employee representative in labor disputes.

“Once you realize the importance of it, and that just simply being there you could prevent someone from being abducted, you feel like it's like a moral duty,” Maldonado said.

This past Wednesday, Maldonado was joined on the island by five other volunteers, armed with cellphones, cameras and binoculars. They photographed cars coming and going from the complex. Red flags for them are dark-tinted windows, mostly American makes and masked drivers. They've documented vehicles with missing license plates or plates being swapped between cars.

Harbor Area patrollers Victor Maldonado and Merci Macatrao walk past a memorial to a Japanese American fishing village that once stood on Terminal Island.

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Josie Huang

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LAist

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Maldonado is in charge of the Instagram page this day, and posts updates as he receives it from other volunteers, as well as sharing it with other community patrols.

Volunteer Gina Lumbruno says sometimes drivers flip them off, turn the camera phones on them or speed by dangerously close — the reason why the patrollers all now wear bright yellow safety vests.

“It’s so stupid,” Lumbruno said. “They give themselves away. They just profile their own selves by their actions.”

A dark chapter

The patrollers stand near a memorial to a vibrant fishing village for 3,000 islanders of Japanese descent who used to work on the harbor or in nearby tuna canneries. The bronze statue is of two fishermen facing opposite directions.

Lumbruno said before the raids, she used to visit the memorial regularly to clean off bird droppings and sweep away debris because of the deep meaning it held for her.

When she was growing up in San Pedro, Lumbruno’s tuna fisherman father told her what happened to the village. How it was demolished during World War II after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. How the Navy forced hundreds of residents into incarceration in Manzanar.

The only two buildings still standing housed a grocery and a dry goods store — structures that preservationists and locals like Lumbruno are trying to save from proposed demolition by port officials.

The A. Nakamura grocery store served the Japanese fishing community on Terminal Island.

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Tim Yuji Yamamoto

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National Trust for Historic Preservation

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“This was something that was done,” said Lumbruno, who works in healthcare. “These people had their civil rights, their human rights, stripped from them just because of some xenophobic B.S., you know?”

Lumbruno said she sees a painful irony in federal agents driving by the bronze fishermen on their way to immigration operations.

“It's just crazy to me,” she said. “The same thing that was done to them is what's happening now.”

Indefinite vigilance

Federal agencies did not respond to LAist’s requests for information about their Terminal Island operations.

But the office of U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragán, who represents Harbor Area communities, said it has confirmed through the Coast Guard that its base is serving as a staging area for Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other personnel with the Department of Homeland Security.

A former immigration detention and processing center is housed on the same federal complex, but that dilapidated structure is not being used (except for a small portion by Coast Guard staff), according to Barragán’s office.

The Trump administration has given no timeline for how long the L.A. sweeps will last. But volunteers with the Harbor Area group vow to continue their work even as their numbers ebb and flow.

With the start of school, they expect participation may dip because a disproportionate number of volunteers are teachers. Maldonado is optimistic that others will step up.

“We're going to keep putting the information out there,” he said. “Even if it helps just one person, we're perfectly OK with that. As long as this continues, so will we.”

In notoriously car-centric Los Angeles, thousands of fans have been taking public transit to get to the World Cup.

Metro has logged more than 100,000 rides to and from SoFi Stadium for the first four matches in Inglewood, on its special shuttle buses carrying fans directly to the stadium from various locations across the region. That service costs $1.75 a pop – the same as a typical bus ride.

The transit agency organized the enhanced bus system to bring passengers to the stadium directly from as far as Newport Beach and as nearby as Culver City. Ridership on those buses has jumped each match – from 18,551 rides to and from the first game between the U.S. and Paraguay to more than 29,000 rides when Iran played Belgium on Sunday afternoon.

There were long lines to catch the shuttle at Union Station before the first two matches. One rider, Cristian Vasquez, came from the Antelope Valley for the U.S.-Paraguay match. He left home at 9:30 a.m. and was the first in line for the bus.

“It’s a service that really helps out the community that probably can't afford SoFi Stadium's parking lot or the existing parking areas,” he said.

After the Iran-New Zealand match, LAist observed long waits for a bus ride home from SoFi, as the crowds exiting after the match all lined up to board the buses at the same time.

People have also been taking the train to the tournament. According to Metro's numbers, when Iran played New Zealand at SoFi last week, K Line ridership was up 41% and C Line ridership jumped 23%, compared to a typical Monday. Those lines are the closest to the stadium.

Other fan events such as the FIFA Fan Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum have led to similar spikes for Metro. On the day of the first match in Los Angeles, when the U.S. beat Paraguay 4-1, the agency reported that fare gate taps at the Expo/USC station were up nearly 600% compared to an average day.

Alicia Greene took Metrolink and Metro to the Fan Fest from Anaheim and was enthusiastic about the journey.

"The Metro system is awesome," she said. "It couldn't be easier."

Angelenos packed trains in Koreatown last week when South Korea and Mexico played each other in a highly anticipated match. Ridership on the newly extended D Line was up more than 95%.

"While we were laser-focused on the stadium, something else was rising across town," Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins wrote in a blog post. "In Koreatown, thousandsof fans poured onto our rail lines at key stations like Wilshire/Western and Wilshire Normandie and into the streets to watch the Mexico-South Korea rematch."

The World Cup is considered a test run for public transit before the 2028 Olympics, and it's not over yet. The next game in Los Angeles is Thursday, when the U.S. plays Turkey at 7 p.m.

Kavish Harjai, Destiny Torres and Matt Ballinger contributed to this report.

The Los Angeles Unified School Board is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a nearly $21 billion spending plan for the next school year.

The budget includes raises, class size reductions and increased mental health support that are part of new contracts with the district’s largest labor unions.

There is also nearly $5 billion in school construction and renovation projects, which are funded by voter-approved bonds — that money cannot be shifted to pay for salaries or other school needs.

LAUSD’s budget next year exceeds expected revenue by $2 billion. The district will, for the third consecutive year, pay the difference with reserves.

However, district staff say by the 2028-29 school year, the budget deficit will grow to $3.6 billion. The board recently approved a fiscal stabilization plan to solve the deficit — but which will likely result in the elimination of thousands of jobs.

The board’s meeting begins at 10 a.m. Tuesday and will stream online.

An earthquake is overdue along Southern California’s “critically stressed” San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, according to a new study.

As stress builds on a fault over centuries, it builds pressure that has to be released in an earthquake. In the study, scientists found that the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are under more stress than at any point in the last 1,000 years, meaning that a massive earthquake could be on the way.

“Because it’s been quite a long time since the Southern San Andreas or the San Jacinto have had a large earthquake, we’ve accumulated a lot of stress,” said Kate Scharer, a co-author of the study and a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Using geological evidence, including tree-ring records and sediment samples, a team of scientists created a computer model that shows how pressure accumulates along faults over time. Then they ran the model up to the present day to estimate how much stress is now building beneath our region. They found that pressure has been gradually building since the last Big One in 1857, one of California’s largest seismic events on record.

“The idea that all of those segments of the fault could have enough stress for an imminent future earthquake was already there,” said Harold Tobin, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and a professor at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “This [study] puts it on more of a quantitative, rigorous scientific basis.”

One area of interest is the Cajon Pass, the narrow corridor between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains.

“Cajon Pass could act as an ‘earthquake gate,’ like a junction that either stops or transmits large ruptures between the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults depending on stress conditions,” said Liliane Burkhard, the lead author of the study and a research affiliate in the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology.

The pass is a place where a major earthquake could jump from one fault system to another, Burkhard said. It could allow the rupture to spread farther across Southern California and affect millions more people across the Coachella Valley and San Bernardino County.

Going forward, Burkhard hopes to study other earthquake-prone regions where several fault systems interact and create risks that remain difficult to predict.

Scientists agree that Southern California will experience another major earthquake. The challenge is that no one knows exactly when.

“It could happen today, tomorrow, or in 10 years, or in 30 years,” said Ahmed Elbanna, director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center and a professor at USC who was not involved in the study. “On geological time scales, these are all very short.”

So it’s a question of when, not if.

“We should certainly expect to experience large earthquakes in our lifetimes,” Scharer said.

A refrigerated warehouse operated by Lineage Logistics has burned in Boyle Heights for nearly a week. Public health officials are urging residents nearby and downwind to protect themselves from the smoky air.

But what exactly is in the air is still unclear.

Authorities say they’ve cleared the most hazardous materials — ammonia and lithium-ion batteries — from the fire zone. A spokesperson for the L.A. Fire Department said foam insulation, wood pallets of food, and solar panels on top of the 500,000 square-foot building continue to smolder.

Materials including plastics, electronics and even rotting meat are likely burning, which means the pollution particles emitted “tend to be highly enriched with toxic organics, toxic metals, that are above and beyond what just normal, day-to-day air pollution would look like,” said UCLA air pollution researcher Yifang Zhu.

She said air quality indexes may capture the concentration of particulate matter in the air, but not necessarily the specific toxins in them.

“You'll have almost like a double jeopardy in a sense that the levels [of particulate matter] are higher, and the toxicity is also higher,” she said.

Measuring heavy metals or volatile organic compounds requires special monitoring equipment, Zhu said.

“It’s very difficult to measure,” she said.

But she suspects at least some types of health-harming heavy metals are likely to be in the smoke.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado on Monday called for more specifics about what is in the smoke.

People “shouldn't have to guess about what they're breathing or rely on rumors, scattered information and updates, and incomplete information,” she said at a news conference. Jurado, whose council district includes Boyle Heights, added that data from regulators, such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District, should be released in clear, understandable language in English and Spanish.

The South Coast AQMD told LAist before Jurado spoke that the agency has monitors that measure particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, but not other types of pollutants. The agency said it has set up additional monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School. The agency added that the Environmental Protection Agency is also monitoring air quality at the fence line of the facility. LAist has reached out to the EPA for details.

Zhu added that even when the fire is eventually put out, the cleanup can kick up even more pollution — a lesson learned through her research after the L.A. fires.

“ I think people really need to take precautions,” Zhu said, emphasizing that those closest to the fire and downwind should avoid being outside as much as possible, keep windows closed, run a HEPA or MERV 13 air filter, and wear an N95 or similar mask otherwise.

UC Irvine toxicology professor Michael Kleinman said if thawed meat is also burning, that could lead to further toxic gases being released.

Experts urged precautions, especially if you smell smoke.

“ For people who are very close to the fire, like the firefighters themselves, they have exposure to both particulate matter and potential toxic gases, and that's why you'll see them wearing respirators,” said UC Irvine chemistry professor Suzanne Blum. “But once you're some feet away from the building, then the primary concern is the particulate smoke that is coming from this fire.”