The Brief

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

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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.

Sonia Villegas, 70, feeds neighborhood cats daily.

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Alejandra Molina

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Boyle Heights Beat

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On the ground, one trap at a time

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.

This year, as South Gate librarian Stephanie Lien reviewed new picture books for the LA County Library’s shelves, she found a story that reflected her own childhood.

Little Bird Laila is the story of a young girl with a big job — translating between the English in her everyday life and the Chinese her parents speak.

“ I know every kid who may be like a first-generation immigrant who has parents who don't speak English that well — they've done the same thing,” Lien said. “I know I did it as a kid.”

In California, an estimated 1.8 million children are part of a family where at least one parent has difficulty speaking English. The experience of kids translating for their family members is called "language brokering.” It can feel burdensome but also build empathy.

“ You get annoyed,” Lien said. “But … [I realized] they need help, just like I do.”

And it turns out, this wasn’t the only SoCal-created picture book on the subject this year. Manhattan Beach author Maritere Rodriguez Bellas and local publisher Lil’ Libros created the bilingual Tío Ricky Doesn't Speak English. (Thanks to MiJa Books co-founder Stephanie Moran Reed for the heads up!)

"Little Bird Laila" and "Tío Ricky Doesn't Speak English"

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Erin Hauer and Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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LAist sat down with both authors to understand how they brought these stories to life and what they hope families find between the pages.

These excerpts are from separate interviews with Maritere Rodriguez Bellas and Kelly Yang.

Author Kelly Yang.

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Jessica Sample

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Author Maritere Rodriguez Bellas.

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LAist: What compelled you to become an author?

Bellas:  Over three decades ago, when I was raising my kids, there was really very little information or education about bilingual parenting.

I grew up with Spanish and English, and then I went to school and I learned a third language, French. While doing that, I met people from all kinds of cultures, and I realized what a gift it was to be able to communicate in all these languages and learn about all these cultures.

Yang: I have been writing for many, many years — pretty much since I was a little kid — but wasn't really sure if I could do it as a profession. I would go to the library, and I would look at the back of books, and I didn't really see anyone who looked like me, so I didn't really know if this was a possibility for someone like me. I loved telling stories. I come from an immigrant background, and my parents and I moved here [from Tianjin, China] when I was 6 years old. Stories were really big in our family, as a way to keep ourselves motivated and paint a brighter future for our lives.

Where did the idea of your book come from? 

Yang: [Little Bird Laila]  mirrors my own childhood experience. To this day, I am the one dealing with pretty much all of the property tax filings — anything that has to do with English, even though my parents actually do speak English. But this is just kind of an inherited job that I'm unfortunately tenured for now.

 As a kid, it was very aggravating. I didn't want to have to do all these other things. When we grow up with parents who really need our help, we don't really have a choice.

I learned that there were things that were pretty powerful about it too. Everyone kind of depended on me. I also got to translate things in my own favor. So for example, when I would go to teacher-parent conferences — and obviously I had a lot of grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes when I was a kid — I would just tell my mom, ‘Kelly is doing an amazing job.’

I learned that there were, you know, two sides of the coin. Yes, there's a lot of work. It can be a big pain, but there were also benefits too.

Bellas:  In 2017, I was asked to write my first children's book.   I did not intend my career to end up as a children's book author, but I wrote that book, and while I was writing it, I kept thinking, ‘This is the book that my kids didn't have when they were growing up.’

I truly believe having raised multicultural kids, the more we expose children to different cultures and different languages, the better adults they're going to be in their future — compassionate, empathetic, respectful. And those are the virtues that I wanna ... show and I want parents to go after when they're raising their little pequeñitos.

Fast forward to 2022, when Bellas reached out to local bilingual book publisher Patty Rodriguez (Lil’ Libros) with a few ideas for children’s books. 

Bellas:  One of the ideas was a boy that had to translate for his grandmother, and she called me on the phone right away, and she’s like, ‘This spoke to me because that was me.’

The little boy in Tío Ricky Doesn't Speak English is Puerto Rican, and throughout the story, there are little hints at his identity. For example, he plays dominoes with his uncle and there’s a bag of plantain chips on the table. Why were those details important to include? 

Bellas:  I wanted my Puerto Rican culture to be highlighted. It's important to me. My kids didn't have that. They spent every summer for, I don't know, 12 years in a row in Ponce, Puerto Rico. So they grew up with the flavors and the smells and the noise and all that from our culture. But they didn't have it once we were back home. I couldn't read them a book where they could actually see themselves.

I also want to share with children from all cultures. I want them to learn about my little island wherever they are.

At one point in Little Bird Laila, the girl realizes she can teach her parents English, even though she hasn’t quite perfected the language herself. Why did you include this uncertainty? 

Yang: I just wanna be real to the authentic experience of someone who is still learning. And there is a lot of self-doubt, right? You're a learner, but you're still able to teach other people even though you are a learner. And I wanted to honor that — that people felt that they could, that they had permission, that they could do it. Because I definitely wasn't perfect at speaking or writing or reading or any of it, but ... there were things I could still give.

What do you hope families take away from your book? 

Yang: The central theme for all my books is to hope that people feel seen and that they find the humor and the heart in the story because there's a lot of funny moments and there's a lot of deeply emotional moments too. We really need to cherish those moments. Whatever we can do to spend time together as a family, right?

It's OK to open up and share that we don't have all the answers or we don't know all of the skills. There are tons of things I tell my kids like, I don't know. I don't know how to navigate that app. Right? Or whatever it is. There's lots of things I don't know, and it's OK to share that, and it's OK to be vulnerable together, and it's OK to learn together.

Bellas: The idea was always that the child, when he or she reads the book, would think, ‘Oh, it's really not a chore to translate. It's really an act of kindness and love and I'm proud to be bilingual.’

In describing the massive undertaking it was to compose the score for the latest Avatar installment, Avatar: Fire and Ash, film composer Simon Franglen has some statistics he likes to share.

One is that almost every minute of the three-hour, 17-minute film was scored — three hours and four minutes to be exact. Printed out, that amount of music totaled more than 1,900 pages and had to be transported in two large road cases.

Another favorite stat of Franglen’s is that the epic score, which needed to match the epic scale of the film, required the work of 210 musicians, singers and engineers in Los Angeles.

Bucking the trend of recording overseas

Franglen is from the U.K., but L.A. has been his home for years. Meaning no disrespect to Britain, Franglen still says, “I would rather be here than anywhere else.”

That pride in his adopted home base has extended to his scoring work for Avatar, which Franglen says he and the film’s producers (director James Cameron and Jon Landau, who passed away in 2024) wanted recorded in Los Angeles, despite the fact that a lot of film scoring is increasingly moving abroad.

Franglen scored the second Avatar film, Avatar: The Way of Water, as well, and worked with Cameron previously, along with his mentor, composer James Horner, on the first Avatar and Titanic.

He also has worked as a session musician and producer with artists like Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Miley Cyrus and Celine Dion — he won a Grammy for Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic.

But even with his membership in the small club of Grammy winners, Franglen is more likely to bring up that he’s been a member of the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, the local professional musicians union, for more than three decades.

Recording the Avatar: Fire and Ash theme in Los Angeles was important to everyone on the production, Franglen says, as was bucking recent trends of scaling back film scores or using more electronic scoring than live orchestras.

“The Hollywood film score is something that we've all grown up with,” Franglen says. And it was important to him and the producers to keep the recording of the score in L.A. (the first and second Avatar scores were recorded here, as well) “because we are very much a part of not just the music community but the film community of L.A., which has been having a tough time recently, as we all know.”

“ I'm very proud of being able to keep the work here,” Franglen says. “And I think the quality of the work is shown in the score itself, which I'm exceedingly proud of.”

Avatar: Fire and Ash’s end-credits song, “Dream As One,” sung by Miley Cyrus and which Franglen co-wrote with Cyrus, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, recently was nominated for a Golden Globe. And the score for Avatar: The Way of Water earned Franglen a 2023 World Soundtrack Award.

How work for musicians in LA has declined and the ripple effects

When Franglen first came to L.A. as a session musician, he says there were seven full-time orchestras working every day. When he was working on pop records, Franglen says, the top guitarists would need to be booked three months in advance because they were so busy.

Today, Franglen says, there’s less and less work because of productions moving overseas.

The latest annual report from Film LA, the official film office for the LA region, found the number of scripted projects filmed in L.A. declined 14 percent from 2023 to 2024.

And while California expanded its Film & TV Tax Credit Program this year to help encourage productions to stay here, its effects aren’t yet known.

“The problem is [...] if you're going to film in Europe, then maybe you don't record the score in L.A.,” Franglen says. “ And eventually what happens is that if I want to hire the finest guitarist in the world, I know that he'll be available. I can probably ask him, ‘Would you be available this week or next?’ And he will say yes.”

While that can be wonderful in many ways, Franglen says, it also means less opportunities overall, including for musicians with less experience who might get a chance at a bigger gig if all the top musicians were as busy as they used to be.

“I'm seeing a lot of the faces that I know from when I was a session musician in my orchestra," Franglen says. "That's great. I'm very, very pleased to see them. But it also means that the turnover has not been as extensive as what one would've expected, and that turnover is important.”

More new players coming in, Franglen says, helps ensure that recording work for movies like Avatar — and smaller scale films too — can stay in Los Angeles for years to come.

FBI deputy director Dan Bongino said Wednesday he plans to step down from the bureau in January.

In a statement posted on X, Bongino thanked President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel "for the opportunity to serve with purpose."

Bongino was an unusual pick for the No. 2 post at the FBI, a critical job overseeing the bureau's day-to-day affairs traditionally held by a career agent. Neither Bongino nor his boss, Patel, had any previous experience at the FBI.

Bongino did have previous law enforcement experience, as a police officer and later as a Secret Service agent, as well as a long history of vocal support for Trump.

Bongino made his name over the past decade as a pro-Trump, far-right podcaster who pushed conspiracy theories, including some involving the FBI. He had been critical of the bureau, embracing the narrative that it had been "weaponized" against conservatives and even calling its agents "thugs."

His tenure at the bureau was at times tumultuous, including a clash with Justice Department leadership over the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

But it also involved the arrest earlier this month of the man authorities say is responsible for placing two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican committee headquarters, hours before the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In an unusual arrangement, Bongino has had a co-deputy director since this summer when the Trump administration tapped Andrew Bailey, a former attorney general of Missouri, to serve alongside Bongino in the No. 2 job.

President Trump praised Bongino in brief remarks to reporters before he announced he was stepping down."Dan did a great job," Trump said. "I think he wants to go back to his show."
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President Trump opened a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday with a message intended to reassure Americans. 

"Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I am fixing it," he said at the start of his speech.

However, in his roughly 20-minute address from the Diplomatic Reception Room, Trump broke little new ground, restating messages his White House has been pushing for months: that current economic problems can still be blamed on former President Joe Biden, and that Trump's second term in office has thus far been a massive success.

Indeed, Trump took a familiar, hyperbolic tone in describing his term.

"Over the past 11 months, we have brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history," he said.

The address had the feel of a Trump rally speech, without the rally. Unlike the often sedate primetime addresses of past presidents, Trump spoke loudly throughout his speech, at times seeming to shout.

The president did announce one new policy, saying that nearly 1.5 million military service members will be receiving a "special warrior dividend" of $1,776, a reference to the nation's founding in 1776. Trump said the money will arrive "before Christmas" and that "the checks are already on the way."

Trump spoke as his approval rating on the economy has hit a new low of 36%, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll. The poll found that the cost of living in particular is weighing on Americans. Fully 45% said prices are their top economic concern right now, far ahead of the next-highest category — housing prices — at 18%.

In addition, the poll found that two-thirds of Americans are "very" or "somewhat concerned" about the impact of tariffs on their personal finances.

Nevertheless, in his address, Trump continued to tout tariffs as a major cause of the economic accomplishments he sought to highlight. That's despite the fact that the various tariffs President Trump has unilaterally imposed are driving prices higher, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reported last week. He told reporters that inflation growth is happening entirely in goods (as opposed to services), and that the growth is "entirely in sectors where there are tariffs."

Though the president highlighted few new policies, he did tease that in the new year he would announce "some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history."

Trump also told Americans that better economic times are ahead, stressing that Americans will receive tax refunds from his "big, beautiful bill" next year.

Though he's recently mocked Democrats' focus on affordability, their focus on pocketbook issues is seen as why they swept key off-year elections in November. And the president has tried to address the issue, recently hitting the road to make his economic case. He pitched supporters in Pennsylvania last week by promising bigger tax returns in April thanks to his policies, as well as promoting "Trump accounts" for children born between 2025-2028.

Trump will have another opportunity to talk directly to voters on Friday, when he will deliver a speech in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
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