The Brief

Suehiro Cafe has been a Little Tokyo staple for half a century, surviving the pandemic, the founder’s death and the current owner’s bout with cancer.

Ultimately, it will be the landlord who will end the restaurant's run.

After a months-long threat of eviction by Anthony Sperl who wants to make way for a new tenant, Suehiro’s owner Kenji Suzuki on Tuesday agreed in court to leave by January 16. He had at least wanted to stay open through the holidays for the sake of his employees.

His struggle to stay in Little Tokyo has become emblematic of the changes facing the historic neighborhood. Neighborhood activists say rising rents and land values have only been accelerated by the arrival of a new Metro station.

They’re calling on the city to help preserve legacy businesses like Suehiro, which they say give the neighborhood its character. A rally in support of Suehiro will be held Sunday at 2 p.m. outside the Little Tokyo Metro station.

Suzuki said at first he stayed quiet about his eviction woes. But as patrons and activists expressed outrage and concern about the loss of Little Tokyo businesses like his to the pandemic and gentrification, he changed his mind.

“Now I think I need to rock the boat and create some waves to let everybody know about what's happening and that Little Tokyo needs everybody's help,” Suzuki said.

The beginning of the end

Suzuki, whose mother opened the restaurant in 1972 with her sister and died of COVID-19 in 2021, found himself in a vulnerable position because he had been on a month-to-month lease for the last 10 years or so.

Suzuki said he saw trouble on the horizon when Sperl last year asked for $100,000 to enter into a long-term lease, which Suzuki could not afford, and raised the monthly rent from $6,400 dollars to $10,000 which Suzuki felt he had not choice but to pay.

But then Suzuki's lawyer Clifford Jung said that Sperl stopped cashing rent checks and started eviction proceedings, alleging nonpayment of rent. When that claim was dismissed, Sperl initiated a legal end to the landlord-tenant relationship with Suzuki, Jung said.

"(Sperl) just decided he didn't want to work with us anymore," Jung said.

Suzuki expected to be evicted by law enforcement as early as this week but during a court hearing Tuesday, the judge asked the two sides to confer and Jan. 16 was chosen as the date that Suehiro would vacate. Jung said the other option was to take the case to trial.

"If (Suzuki) wanted to go all the way, I would have done it," Jung said. "But he just wanted to try to find a way to get to the end."

Jung said that Suzuki reserves the right to file a separate action against Sperl if he wants. Neither Sperl nor his attorney Dennis Block could be reached for comment.

The lunch crowd at Suehiro Cafe enjoys specials like curry rice and miso-flavored pork.

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Josie Huang

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The community rallies

For months, the Little Tokyo community has been rallying to save the restaurant, which has been serving miso-flavored pork and curry rice, affordable to local seniors and downtown workers alike, in its current location for more than 35 years.

A pegboard at Suehiro Cafe lists the lunch specials.

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Recent days have seen Japanese American activists gathering signatures from patrons outside Suehiro calling for a stop to the eviction.

Kristin Fukushima, managing director of the Little Tokyo Community Council, said Monday that dozens of legacy businesses have been lost in recent years.

A coalition of Japanese American activists asked the public to support Suehiro's fight against its eviction.

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“We are at a point where Little Tokyo is facing an existential threat as to what our future is,” Fukushima said.

Reports that Sperl will replace Suehiro with a marijuana dispensary have been especially worrying.

Longtime Suehiro patron David Palos, holding his daughter, Lola, signed a petition to keep Suehiro Cafe in Little Tokyo.

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A coalition of Japanese American organizations said they would organize a boycott of a dispensary or any replacement that's not a fit for the neighborhood.

Mark Masaoka of the social justice group Nikkei Progressives said that Sperl's late mother, from whom he inherited Little Tokyo properties, had been a friend to local businesses and lived in the neighborhood herself.

Suehiro Cafe, opened 49 years ago by Junko Suzuki, is at a crossroads.

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"She would have been horrified at the thought that he was tossing out all these Japanese American long-standing institutions here to replace them with what he is doing right now," Masaoka said.

Advocates say there need to be more ways to save struggling legacy businesses through efforts such as the Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund, which has raised about $750,000.

New faces in the neighborhood

Neighborhood advocates say that Sperl had already pushed out a neighboring Japanese American business, Family Mart. It's been replaced by Space City Vintage which moved its clothing store from the second floor to the first.

Several new tenants have moved into the upper-level space once occupied by Space City, including tattoo artist Stefan Farrera.

Farrera, who specializes in "American and Japanese traditional" art at Black Sun Tattoo, said that he had not even known that he shared a landlord with the restaurant, and he bemoaned its departure and potential replacement by a dispensary.

He declined to comment on Sperl and his history with other tenants but said the landlord had rented him an affordable space that he shares with a multicultural mix of creatives: a leather worker, plant seller, streetwear vendor and upcycle store. Together, he says, the new tenants have helped to bring a “charge” to Little Tokyo.

Stefan Farrera, owner of Black Sun Tattoo, shares the same landlord as Suehiro Cafe.

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“The space offers us an opportunity as small, small business owners to make our living doing what we want to do and I think that brings a DIY element to Little Tokyo, which is very big in our punk scenes,“ Farrera said.

What's next

As for Suzuki, in September, he opened a new Suehiro location downtown on Main Street in anticipation of being evicted.

He is also running a smaller restaurant in Chinatown — a juggling act that's tough on his shaky health. Suzuki, 61, is in remission from leukemia. Then in August, he was struck while in his car by a motorist in a stolen vehicle, a crash that's left his legs aching as he serves customers.

Despite the collision of challenges, Suzuki says he will fight to be able to serve his mother's dishes again in Little Tokyo.

“I know someday we will return,” Suzuki said. "We have to return. That’s almost a non-issue for me.”

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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Julia Barajas

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.