Marisol Ramos, who founded Boyle Heights Gatos, works to trap, neuter, return cats at a home in Boyle Heights on April 30, 2025.
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Jaqueline Ramirez
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Topline:
An estimated 300 community cats near Sonia Villegas' home have all been “fixed,” thanks to her and Boyle Heights Gatos, a volunteer-run group working toward humanely controlling the cat population through a practice known as trap-neuter-return, or TNR.
How it works: Cats are trapped in a box, taken to a veterinarian to get neutered or spayed, and returned to their outdoor homes. Villegas has played a key role by establishing a regular feeding schedule that makes it easier to trap cats at predictable times.
Why it matters: For years, Angelenos have tried to contain cat colonies to help curb the city’s pet overpopulation crisis. But in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East L.A., where public services often fall short, residents are taking matters into their own hands. Their grassroots efforts go beyond helping animals, they’re filling service gaps shaped by housing inequalities, rising costs and immigration-related displacement.
Read on... for more about these volunteers' efforts to control the cat population in Boyle Heights.
This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on May 15, 2025
Free-roaming cats emerge from alleys and driveways in this Boyle Heights neighborhood as soon as they sense Sonia Villegas is nearby.
They purr and meow, awaiting their feed, as Villegas fills cardboard bowls with cat food that she carries in a stroller during her evening walk. As they eat, she points to their clipped ears — a sign they’ve been spayed or neutered.
An estimated 300 community cats near her home have all been “fixed,” thanks to Villegas and Boyle Heights Gatos, a volunteer-run group working toward humanely controlling the cat population through a practice known as trap-neuter-return, or TNR. Cats are trapped in a box, taken to a veterinarian to get neutered or spayed, and returned to their outdoor homes. Villegas has played a key role by establishing a regular feeding schedule that makes it easier to trap cats at predictable times.
“It’s not just about feeding. It’s about spaying and neutering, and vaccinating at the same time,” Villegas, 70, says in Spanish. “We don’t want the cats to have so many kittens, leaving the poor kittens abandoned.”
For years, Angelenos have tried to contain cat colonies to help curb the city’s pet overpopulation crisis. But in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and East L.A., where public services often fall short, residents are taking matters into their own hands. Their grassroots efforts go beyond helping animals, they’re filling service gaps shaped by housing inequalities, rising costs and immigration-related displacement.
“It’s all interconnected,” said Marisol Ramos, who founded Boyle Heights Gatos during the pandemic. “Fear of immigration crackdowns has forced some people to leave, and leave their community pets behind. It’s only going to get worse.”
Cats are lured into box traps with a trail of wet cat food.
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Susanica Tam
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Boyle Heights Beat
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A grassroots effort amid overwhelming need
Ramos finds time to do TNR after her day job as an administrator at UCLA. She begins trapping midweek, usually after 6 p.m., to fill 15 weekly scheduled spay and neuter appointments at FixNation clinic in Sun Valley. She reaches that weekly goal by working with other volunteer trappers in Boyle Heights and East L.A.
Lately, Ramos says she encounters people asking, “What do I need for my cat or dog so I can take them to Mexico?” Or, “This person is [self-deporting]. Can you take the cat to get fixed?”
Then there are the cats she has captured within mobile homes near Olympic Boulevard, placing traps inside the vans where unhoused people live. “They [the unhoused] care about their animals, and a lot of the shelters don’t allow you to bring your pet so people choose to live inside a car just to be with their pets. They need services,” she said.
Ramos estimates she helped sterilize 600 cats last year and is tracking another 600 free-roaming cats that need spay and neuter care just in East L.A. and Boyle Heights. She collects tips from neighbors and Instagram DMs, then logs the information on Google Maps to determine which locations to strategically target.
“There’s a lot of need, and it’s up to us regular people to figure out what to do,” said Ramos, who lives in Boyle Heights.
Marisol Ramoss sets up a cat trap in Boyle Heights on April 30, 2025.
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Susanica Tam
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Trapping cats can take an hour, days, weeks or even months.
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Susanica Tam
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Boyle Heights Beat
)
Ramos also helps residents navigate the shame and judgment that comes from unmanaged cat colonies near their homes. Many residents doing TNR in Boyle Heights and East L.A. are Spanish-speaking and Ramos is there to explain the process and understand how the situation got out of hand.
“There are people who are irresponsible, but there are also a lot more people who are like, ‘I just don’t have money to pay.’ Because if you go to a vet, they [can] charge you like $400 for a spay and neuter.”
Ramos, herself, spent more than $30,000 last year on sterilization, including about $10,000 from her own pocket. She secured grants and took up consulting jobs to help pay for those services, and also used vouchers from the Citywide Cat Program to cover costs.
Now, as the city navigates a budget shortfall, advocates like Ramos are urging the city to prioritize increasing reimbursement rates covering sterilization costs. To Ramos, TNR offers a band-aid to the issue. The real solution, she said, is making spay and neuter easier to access.
“If the city pushed for affordable spay neuter options [and] made that accessible, I don’t think we would be in the situation that we’re in,” Ramos said.
A distrust of outside rescuers
In Boyle Heights and East L.A., Ramos was intent on setting clear boundaries for TNR, especially after witnessing outsiders strolling in to trap and “rescue” cats without making contact with neighbors.
Across social media, Ramos has encountered trappers who share about cats they’ve found in “terrible living situations” or in a “poor neighborhood with lots of violence.” She’s seen people who come in and take kittens, leaving the adult cats “to continue breeding,” and neighbors wondering about the whereabouts of the community cats they’ve been feeding.
“They’re painting a picture of the neighborhood as this is bad Boyle Heights, [a] bad part of East L.A., gang-infested, garbage ridden, just to make a story about saving a cat appealing to that savior mentality,” Ramos said.
On a recent Wednesday evening, Ramos trapped six cats with the help of Katelyn Vargas, a Boyle Heights resident who reached out to her after noticing a surge of community cats around her home. Three of them were pregnant.
She trapped the first three on the grounds of Vargas’ home and the other half within the property of the next-door neighbor, who had amassed more than a dozen community cats in her yard.
The cats were lured into box traps with a trail of wet cat food as bait on sheets of paper. Once inside, a trigger plate shut the door. Ramos put the cats at ease, covering the cages with blankets or towels.
Trapping that evening took about an hour, a success story considering that sometimes it takes days, weeks or even months to trap certain cats.
But Ramos couldn’t shake a feeling of helplessness, realizing they had not yet reached containment in that specific neighborhood. “I thought we had it under control when I last came here,” she said.
To Ramos, TNR is a “community responsibility.”
“I’m not a person coming in to rescue, or be a savior to anybody. I help people by bringing the traps and transporting them, but I encourage everybody to learn how to trap,” she said.
Libby Rainey
has been covering the World Cup in Los Angeles.
Published July 13, 2026 6:35 PM
A group gathered in downtown Los Angeles last week to give a red card to FIFA and 2026 World Cup corporate sponsors.
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Libby Rainey
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LAist
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Topline:
This summer's World Cup has been a bonanza for corporate sponsors. Some of them have provoked outrage in Los Angeles.
What happened: At a demonstration in downtown L.A. last week, advocates rallied against a number of high-profile sponsors of the tournament, including Home Depot and Hyundai-Kia over human rights concerns.
What FIFA and the companies are saying: LAist has reached out to FIFA, Home Depot and the Hyundai Motor Group, which also owns Kia, for comment.
Read on... for more on advocate concerns as L.A. looks ahead to the Super Bowl and Olympics.
This summer's World Cup has been a bonanza for corporate sponsors.
Hydration breaks are "powered by Powerade." Each game crowns a Michelob Ultra "superior player of the match." Even the signs announcing player substitutions have a label slapped on: Rexona deodorant, which is owned by Unilever. They're the "official personal care sponsor" of this World Cup.
This relentless branding is nothing new for major sporting events, but it has provoked outrage in Los Angeles, where protests during the tournament took aim at FIFA's corporate partners, saying they betrayed the city's values.
At a demonstration in downtown L.A. last week, advocates rallied against a number of high-profile sponsors of the tournament, including Home Depot, the official "home improvement retailer" for the 2026 World Cup.
" Their parking lots have been turned into hunting grounds," said Miriam Arghandiwal, an organizer with the Boycott Home Depot Coalition.
" FIFA has been intentional in allowing the people's game to become the billionaire's game, and there's no better example of this than its choice in sponsors," she said at the protest.
Demonstrators said they wanted FIFA to make corporate accountability a metric of accepting a sponsor.
" We know mega-events like the World Cup can only happen with the support of host communities, local infrastructure and resources, with the workers throughout various supply chains that make these events possible," said Valerie Lizárraga with the nonprofit Jobs to Move America.
The group was also gathered to demand action from the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission, which runs the L.A. World Cup Host Committee. Demonstrators said they were dissatisfied with the committee's guidance on human rights for the World Cup.
A spokesperson for that commission deferred to FIFA for comment on corporate sponsorships. FIFA did not respond to LAist's request.
The World Cup is wrapped up in Los Angeles after Friday's quarterfinal match between Spain and Belgium. But advocates rallying in L.A. say they are looking toward the future.
" Things like the World Cup [and] the Olympics are events that are fueled by people," said Father Thomas Carey, a member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. "The question is, do we hold them to account to take care of and protect the people who work for them and the people who attend their games?"
The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.
The proposed rule: The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.
What's next: Normally, HHS would propose a rule, accept public comment for 60 days, and then finalize the rule so that it could take effect. In this case, after proposing the rule in December and receiving more than 30,000 comments, the administration is abandoning the rule. At least in the next year, it will not be finalized and will not take effect.
The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.
The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told NPR in a statement: "CMS does not comment on future rulemaking or speculate on potential actions. The Trump Administration rejects ideologically driven surgical interventions on vulnerable children."
(Surgery is very rare among transgender people under age 18, and the rule applied to all gender-affirming care, which is mainly therapy and medications for children.)
A "victory" for trans rights, but not a "retreat" by HHS
The fact that the Trump administration is backing off from this action is "a victory for people who are defending the rights and interests of trans people," says Sam Bagenstos, a professor at Michigan Law who served as general counsel at HHS under the Biden administration. "But I don't think it indicates a more general retreat from the aggressive posture of the Trump administration."
Bagenstos notes that this type of leverage — a "conditions of participation" rule for the Medicare and Medicaid program — has historically been used by HHS to compel states and hospitals to meet basic health and safety standards. Things like "making sure that you have stockpiles of certain kinds of equipment, making sure that you have certain kinds of emergency protocols, making sure that you have certain staffing ratios," he explains.
The proposed rule was unprecedented, Bagenstos says, because it instead would have prohibited certain kinds of treatments for a certain population. He says it seemed unlawful in a variety of ways. For one, "it violates the Medicare Act, which says that Medicare and Medicaid can't be used to control the practice of medicine within the state — states get to regulate the practice of medicine," Bagenstos says.
Medical groups opposed the change
Normally, HHS would propose a rule, accept public comment for 60 days, and then finalize the rule so that it could take effect. In this case, after proposing the rule in December and receiving more than 30,000 comments, the administration is abandoning the rule. At least in the next year, it will not be finalized and will not take effect.
The American Medical Association and the Children's Hospital Association both submitted comments urging the agency to rescind or withdraw the proposed rule. Major U.S. medical groups say that puberty blockers and sex hormones are safe and can be effective for transgender young people.
Even so, gender-affirming care for youth is banned in 27 states after a flurry of laws passed over the last several years. In the remaining 23 states, many hospital clinics that offer gender-affirming care have continued to operate, while others have shuttered in the past year citing pressure from the Trump administration.
That pressure has come in the form of this proposed rule, another rule that would bar federal Medicaid reimbursement for transgender pediatric patients, and a declaration from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that aimed to redefine the standard of care. (Interestingly, the press release issued when those actions were unveiled in December is now missing from the HHS website, as is the Kennedy declaration document.)
The Medicaid rule is currently in the final stage of review and appears to be on track to take effect in the coming weeks. A coalition of Democratic-led states sued over the so-called Kennedy declaration and succeeded in blocking it in federal court in Oregon. The Trump administration has not appealed that decision so far.
Protesters who are against gender-affirming care for young people gathered outside Boston Children's Hospital in September 2022.
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Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe
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Getty Images
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At the same time, the Department of Justice has issued administrative and criminal subpoenas to hospitals seeking full personal medical files for transgender youth and employment files for their medical providers, although many of those attempts have been blocked in court so far. The Trump administration has also reached settlements with hospitals in Texas and Ohio that involved establishing "detransition" clinics.
And last month, when the Supreme Court allowed states to bar young transgender girls from sports, the White House issued a press release saying that the decision "Bolsters President Trump's Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity." The release listed actions targeting transgender people across the federal government, from passport markers to military service to research funding.
Will hospitals that ended care for trans youth restart it?
While the Trump administration does not appear to be backing down from anti-transgender actions broadly, its decision not to finalize its most aggressive healthcare rule is significant, says Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at Georgetown University who also worked in the Biden administration. Those other efforts are not nearly as durable as a finalized rule that takes effect, she notes.
The decision of the Trump administration not to finalize this rule "should give hospitals more confidence to either resume or continue offering the care," she says. Because the rule was never in effect, "I would argue that they should have been doing this all along anyway."
Kellan Baker agrees. He's a senior adviser for health policy at the Movement Advancement Project think tank, which focuses on LGBTQ issues. "This administration may have checked itself in one of the most extreme expressions of its agenda and I think people should take solace in that," he says. "But at the same time, this administration is continuing to show that its ultimate goal is eliminating healthcare for trans people and that it is apparently prepared to use almost any means necessary to do so."
The Medicare and Medicaid rule could theoretically be revived at some point, since it has not been formally withdrawn. An entry in the Trump administration's recent unified agenda sets a final action date for the proposed rule as December 2028, just before President Trump leaves office.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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Kevin Tidmarsh
is a producer for LAist, covering news and culture. He’s been an audio/web journalist for about a decade.
Published July 13, 2026 4:45 PM
As crews clean up tons of spoiling food at Lineage's warehouse in Boyle Heights, residents have complained about persistent smells.
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Andrew Lopez
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Topline:
Air quality officials have cited Lineage LLC for “rotten, sour, garbage-type odors” emanating from its Boyle Heights warehouse after getting more than 40 complaints Sunday.
About the complaints: In a statement, the South Coast Air Quality Management District said inspectors confirmed the smells with local community members and traced the source to cleanup activities at the warehouse. Officials estimate that 85 million pounds of food in the cold storage facility have spoiled after a fire last month.
The notice of violation: South Coast AQMD cited Lineage for violating California state code that prohibits “emissions that cause injury, nuisance, or annoyance to a significant number of people or the public.”
About the smell: I smelled the odor for myself from hundreds of feet away while driving on the 5 Freeway near Boyle Heights at about 11 p.m. Sunday. Though I had my car windows up, it quickly registered to me as the smell of decomposing animal matter. The strong odor persisted for about a minute until I left the Boyle Heights area.
What happens next: If a settlement with Lineage isn’t reached, the company could face civil penalties and even a lawsuit, according to South Coast AQMD’s statement.
What residents have been saying: At a contentious town hall meeting last Thursday, Boyle Heights and East L.A. residents slammed Los Angeles city officials and Lineage for their handling of the fire and the cleanup. Locals challenged L.A. Mayor Karen Bass to spend the night near the warehouse to experience the odor. She committed to spending more time in Boyle Heights, including at night.
Lineage’s response: An email to the only media contact listed on Lineage’s website was flagged as “undeliverable.” LAist has reached out directly to a Lineage press representative for comment.
How to report odors in your neighborhood
You can register complaints with the South Coast AQMD over odors, smog and other nuisances affecting air quality online or by calling (800) 288-7664.
You can find more information on how to register complaints at the South Coast AQMD's website.
Cato Hernández
covers important issues that affect the everyday lives of Southern Californians.
Published July 13, 2026 4:14 PM
California's mobile ID program is expanding after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law.
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Courtesy California DMV
)
Topline:
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a new law that expands the state's mobile ID program to more than half of licensed drivers, according to his office.
What's new: The pilot program has been around for a few years, but it was limited to only a fraction of Californians. Now, 60% of drivers and state ID-holders can access a mobile version of their cards.
How it works: You store your ID on your phone through the California DMV Wallet app, and it can be added to certain phone wallets.
Keep reading... for how to join and where you can use it.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a new law that expands the state's mobile ID program to 60% of licensed drivers, his office announced Monday.
For the last few years, participating residents have been able to use the state-issued mobile app and store their IDs in certain phone wallets as part of a pilot program.
Where you can use it
The program works for driver's licenses and state IDs.
The mobile version is mainly valid at airport security, but use is expected to expand in the future.
One big caveat: Mobile IDs are not accepted by law enforcement or most state government agencies.
That means you should still keep your physical ID or license with you, especially if you're driving. You can find a full list of accepted places on the DMV's website.
How you can apply
Access to the program was previously capped to 4.2 million drivers — now that's quadrupled to over 16 million.
You can join the pilot by downloading the CA DMV Wallet app from your phone's app store and logging into your MyDMV account.
You'll need to provide your driver's license or ID card information. The app will prompt you to scan your card, and you'll have to refresh the mobile ID every 30 days.
More than 3.5 million Californians have joined so far.
